I enjoyed this one but it’s slightly odd. The first two thirds of the book are a fairly sedate description of a murder investigation. That’s OK because the characters are good and the writing is excellent. Then there is some action but it’s the hero, Matthew Scudder, taking out his frustration on a mugger which has nothing to do with the plot. In the last third the author revels in the unpleasantness of everything that happened before the story started. I liked enough to read the next in the series though