After a dozen or so Thomas novels under my belt, I’m confident in saying this book is different in one major way - Lucifer Dye has a long and painful back story that takes about ⅓ of the book to fully tell - and in first person. Because of that, it’s less of a run-away-train than many of his books. Sure, the plot is just as intricate and full of double and even triple dealing, but so many breaks are taken to move Dye through his past that it takes the pot of the boil a bit too much. I prefer his characters to keep to task and leave a lot of mystery as to their origins and how they came to be the slightly (oh ever-so-slightly) bent schemer they are.

There isn’t a pointed bad guy either. Usually there is a right to be wronged or a score to settle, but this one is just straight up corruption for corruption’s sake. A changing of the corruption guard so to speak. And boy is there a lot of that - in the present day and in Dye’s past. As usual, Thomas’s dialogue, descriptions and quips just roll, although I did notice a high similarity to Chandler this time out. To wit -

“When he drew near enough I could see that one was brown and one was blue and neither of them contained any more warmth than you would find in a slaughterhouse freezer.” p 18 (talking about a character’s eyes)

“He looked, all in all, a little prissy until you noticed his dark blue eyes which he may have borrowed from the local hangman…” (again with the eyes!) ( )

I once heard Thomas described as “readable.” Not sure whether it was intended as compliment or insult but I tend to agree with the description. In alternating chapters this novel follows three time periods in the hero’s life until it catches up to the present day--in this case 1970--where the story moves to an unnamed Southern city. And that’s where things get more than a little troublesome. The N-word is thrown around liberally. Not just with bigots and villains but with everybody: good, bad; innocent, guilty; even with black and white alike. I know recent real-world events have made clear that we are not as enlightened as we once thought, but this open prejudice showered the environment too heavily to allow me to completely enjoy the story, particularly since I know Ross Thomas called it the way he saw it: if it’s is in the book, that’s what he found when he did his research. Even with a twenty-five-year gap, there was too much uncomfortable truth within this piece of fiction. ( )