RaveMystery Tribune\"...the book explores city consciousness as much as it does its characters’ motivations. The New York of the era, before it was entirely lost to developers and hyper-gentrification, is in fact a character in this novel, one that figures crucially ... Murphy’s postmodern but highly readable story manages to bring readers into a specific time and place—the Manhattan and Brooklyn of the mid-2000s—in such a way as to give life to the city as much as the people, and to tell us something about both the thrill of living there, and the existential (?) quandaries that necessarily ensnare these urbanites at the same time ... [an] excellent mystery novel ... There are funny, clever, and genuinely important references to notable works of literature and film throughout, a feature that supports the plot and adds a bit of clever novelty. It would be easy to bungle this, to come off as pretentious, as self-consciously \'literary.\' But Murphy manages it all so deftly that the material always seems to please, like a puzzle ... if you’re interested in a smart mystery, in a page-turner of a book that’s \'meta\' in a good way, you won’t do wrong to pick up Dwyer Murphy’s An Honest Living.\
