Excellent 3rd entry in the series

Enjoyable read although nothing much happens.

I really enjoy movies and lots of times tend to draw up possible movie adaptations to books I've read. This one (or a Hoke Moseley book in general) would be fantastic. Just get Woody Harrelson to be Hoke, Sam Rockwell to be the antagonist du jour and of course have Martin McDonagh write and direct. I feel Willeford's unique style of brusque dialogue, dark humor, and sporadic violence is an exact fit here.
As a standalone book this one is a page turner and I think could be read on its own without having read the previous two. This one features a side by side narrative between Hoke and the criminals. Hoke is burned out big time and sets his sights on early retirement but just can't manage to simplify his life because he can't stand idly by as things happen around him. The criminals which are made up of a disfigured prostitute, a starving artist, and a retiree, are all led by the charismatic yet vicious leader, Tony. The set up with Tony and his gang is the more interesting of the two plots because well, Hoke isn't doing much we haven't seen him do before (dealing with family issues) and Willeford really does write interesting people who have their own moral compasses. Tony lures all of his heist participants in through promises of using the proceeds to further their aspirations, or for the retiree "Pops" to give him the son he never had. This angle leads up to the heist itself which happens about 90 percent of the way into the book and is explosive and neck breaking like the title suggests.

A crime novel without much crime, and in which the main protagonist, detective Hoke Moseley, only connects with the crime/criminals after the action is over.

In the meantime, Hoke had a breakdown, attempts to manage his father’s apartment complex, while juggling teenage daughters, police colleagues, his father and step-mother. It’s all very mundane and unremarkable.

The secondary (more interesting) plot line revolves around an elderly man who blindly becomes involved with a small-time criminal planning a robbery.

A pleasant, but ultimately unsatisfying read.

Pitch black but excellent

Not bad, but not as good as the first two in the series. Willeford tries to write a crime novel without much crime, which is fine, since Hoke is always interesting. But his counterpart in the parallel plot, Stanley, is too stupid too often.

At some point in the past, for reasons that I don't recollect, I stuck this book on my "Things to Check Out" list at WorldCat.org. The Portsmouth (NH) Public Library doesn't own any books at all by the author, Charles Willeford, but the UNH Library had a copy from back in the days it doubled as Durham's town library. And so…

I didn't really know what to expect. Caveat Lector: it's very violent (eventually), one early scene is guaranteed to never, ever, appear in a movie as is. And there are long stretches where not much happens that's relevant to the main plot. It's easy reading though, with a hefty amount of very dark humor.

It's part of Willeford's "Hoke Moseley" series, number 3 of 4. Moseley is a Miami cop, but as the book opens, he's a pants-peeing basket case, burned out, unable to return to work at his current assignment of investigating cold cases. His wife has left him, he's got a rocky relationship with his daughters. He decamps for Singer Island, where his father lives, and as he recovers from his burnout, resolves to spend the rest of his life there, somehow.

In a parallel plot thread, oldster Stanley Sinkiewicz, retired auto worker, gets jailed due to that scene I mentioned above. There he meets Troy Louden, a self-described criminal psychopath. But Stanley's not one to judge. (Although that would have been a good idea.) Troy and Stanley develop a (um) complex relationship, and Stanley gets roped into Troy's next caper, a supermarket heist that will put them on Easy Street. Albeit, in Haiti. But that's the plan, anyway.

Other characters pop up along the way: an ex-stripper/prostitute with a ruined face, an aspiring artist from Barbados, various tenants at the apartment building that Moseley starts managing for his father. Nobody is particularly admirable, not even Moseley. But interesting and colorful; I'll give them that.

An aggressively casual Florida-fried detective mystery, where the detective spends most of his time running a motel and the mystery never seems to appear.

i read three books from Charles Willeford and this one bored me very quickly. Struggled to finish. Not much in the story, parallel stories. A big let down

love these books. this one might be my favorite.Hoke Moseley's my hero! i'm sad there's only one more!

The book ends magnificently.

To get around the heavy, crazy traffic at the Golden Glades exchange, which every wise Floridian avoided, if possible, Hoke left the Sunshine Parkway at the Hollywood exit and picked up the I-95 for the rest of the way into the city. As the thousands of lighted windows in the tall Miami buildings came into view, Stanley spoke for the first time on the trip.
“What’s going to happen to me, Sergeant?”
“Hell, Pop,” Hoke said, not unkindly, “except for the paperwork, it already has.”

Più una satira sulla vita in Florida negli anni '80 che un noir.Divertente e caustico.