Reviews and Comments

One of the most breathtakingly racist novels I've EVER read. No opportunity overlooked to cram in some weird racist stereotype or another, and there's a little homophobia and just the merest dusting of transphobia too. It's like the author believed that "grit" had to include simply the most embarrassing, lazy racist stereotyping or something. (The most charitable take I might have on this is that Crais does sincerely seem to be going for an "everyone is kind of bad and broken and I'm gonna get real 'real' about it, and that means making minorities look bad too" or something, but...ugh. It doesn't land as anything other than the laziest, ugliest, cringiest stereotyping.)

Extra frustrating because the skeleton of the plot is reasonably compelling and when Crais manages to string together a few consecutive non-racist paragraphs he does a fun job of evoking an idea of LA-in-the-90s that I genuinely enjoyed. The nicest thing I'll say is that L.A. Requiem managed to make me very nostalgic for the nineties and stirred in me a desire to read some (more sophisticated/nuanced/better) hardboiled detective fiction. But yeah, oof, I don't even want to leave this in a little free library or donate it somewhere.

Gosh. I don't know that I can heartily recommend this one. For one thing, Dee invokes Romany traditions all over the place with no citations (other than maybe "a good friend told me about XYZ" or "this pair of sisters I knew" and maybe that's fine but I dunno) AND he alternates between "Romany" and a word I've been told many times is a slur, so...mmm. I dunno. Proceed with caution.

Beyond that, this book is deeply invested in gender binaries, which is a little tedious. (Lots of Card X will stand for a man and Card Y will stand for a woman with plenty of assumptions that love and marriage happen between men and women and that's that.) Not great.

There's also a lot of "this card stands for an independent dark-haired woman, probably divorced or widowed" and "that card stands for a gray-haired man who lives in the countryside and gives good advice" (similar to Dee's tarot book that I own) and while I have no grievance with people who like that and incorporate that sort of thing into their practice, it leaves me cold.

I'm not mad I read it and the list of Dee's meanings for the cards will probably be something I return to, but it's not something I'm going to urge anybody to read.