The Wheel of Doll by Jonathan Ames (Pushkin Vertigo, £8.99)
This is perfect hardboiled crime fiction for the 21st century, making excellent use of noir tropes but without the distaste for humanity displayed by writers such as Raymond Chandler. LA investigator Happy Doll is a Buddhist who says prayers for the bad guys and enjoys spending time with his dog. The second novel in the series sees him on the trail of a missing woman who turns out to be a former girlfriend. Mary DeAngelo says she is desperate to find her long-lost mother, a junkie living rough in Washington state, but Doll soon senses something off about both Mary and her husband, and things turn ugly. At once implausible – our hero, a 51-year-old with a single kidney, gets stomped, shot and thrown unconscious into a river, but keeps going – and entirely real, The Wheel of Doll has a propulsive plot, frictionless prose and plenty of dark humour.
