Lew Griffin is a drunk - you know what? Life drives you to it. He's a tough guy, a private eye and his on/off girlfriend's a hooker, which pretty much douses this andric story in testosterone's cheap cologne. Griffin is no dullard or thug; what self-disrespecting PI is? He's a lover of heavy weight literature, and he likes to name drop.

Lew's your drunk- depressed friend - the kind who likes to start talking philosophy, in French, half way down the bourbon bottle. Except given the right motivation, this detective will kick a guy so hard, his balls will go into orbit.

The story is sporadic and compartmentalised, with cases scattered between New Orleans atmospherics, Lew's non-specific inner woe, and a delicate lacings of interwoven theme - though you can join the dots yourself, you lazy bums. The job is tough, almost James Ellroy tough, and no one gets away clean. Lew works overtime clocking up the hardboiled born mots; as beautiful and perspicacious as they are despairing.

The story begins with Lew as a youngish man, impenetrable and unlikeable, it ends with him older wiser, more open, less fractured. Even less likeable, for all that he's grown and become respectable. The story and spartan style got under my skin, but the heavy on the macho bullshit rubbed me up wrong thanks to stubble burn. That the author also wrote Drive comes as no surprise.

If you like a modern noir, or if you'd like to see what a stripped down James Ellroy reads like, this is the detective story for you. If there were more New Orleans and less Lew Griffith, it might have been the story for me too.