Rob Leininger’s attention to philosophical detail mirrors my own: Bad often begets good. Witty humor softens grisly crime scene descriptions, making Mort my go-to gumshoe. Gumshoe Rock rocks! It has earned a spot on my Bookreporter Top Picks Dean’s List.
... a gritty one-two punch of a PI mystery ... Fast moving, wisecracking, and deadly, each chapter features tight beats that build suspense. The landscape is incorporated into scenes with humor and wonderful physicality. Several slapstick moments are laugh-out-loud funny, especially when delivered in Mort’s deadpan voice ... For all its grisly crime scenes, the novel is also funny, and its humor sets it apart, making its extreme violence more tolerable. Its sex scenes happen off-stage, and while Mort’s relationship with Lucy is charged, its depiction leans on mutual playfulness instead of straightforward romance ... a knock-your-socks-off mystery with a healthy dose of graveyard humor.
... intriguing ... wishes to be a hard-boiled knockout while commenting on the form, even mocking it ... The two cases merge, or try to, amid the author’s postmodern digs. He imagines Spade and Marlowe mocking him, exults in zingy accolades for his one-liners, and manages, amid all the wordplay, to survive a kerosene-soaked finale that is, incidentally, a stunning bit of bravura writing.
Fans of Travis McGee hungry for red-meat private-eye adventure will tune out the mystery and focus on the hero’s effortlessly self-confident sex appeal, superhuman physical strength, and nice way with dialogue.
... sluggish ... Mort never misses the opportunity to ramble about generational differences as well as the government-sanctioned criminals working in the IRS. The relationship between Mort and Lucy functions as wish fulfillment, robbing her of agency as well as necessity to the story. The convoluted buildup, meanwhile, supersedes the effort to construct a dramatically satisfying mystery. Those who prefer an antiquated take on the hard-boiled genre will best appreciate this one.
