What a pleasure it's been to find an author that so consistently gives me exactly what I want and expect out of a detective noir.

While this is a third book in a series, there's no real continuity to worry about and absolutely holds up as a standalone entry. We got our barely-scraping-by protagonist in Philip Marlowe taking a job from a rich client who's adversarial from the jump. We got a huge cast of characters introduced in a frontloaded opening third of the story. And we got a couple of seemingly unrelated murders that all get pulled together in a complicated web of relationships. Set it in 1940's Los Angeles and give everyone old-timey vocabulary and you got a bona fide noir.

Will I remember every exact detail of this story a few months from now? Most certainly not, but I'll remember that I enjoyed my time with it, and that's good enough for me.