The best of the series - a twisting noir in the Miami of the early 80s. Books like this will never be written again, so filled with references and mindsets of the era that any modern attempt to capture them will be forced or artistic, not flow as effortlessly as they seem to from the mind and pen of Charles Willeford. Hoke Moseley is one of a kind, all four books were good, I am giving this one f stars so it will appear in my goodreads 'Read' list for the year in a larger size, so I can remember how much fun a pulp novel can be.

Miami Blues is terrific; the next two are OK; this is awful. I wanted to like this--I really did. But the characters' actions are so preposterous that I bailed two-thirds of the way. A killer who threatened Hoke before Hoke's testimony sent him away for life is suddenly paroled, buys the house across the street from Hoke's, and spends a day staring at Hoke's house--but then Alita goes on a date with him? What? She as a cop for ten years and knows the guy is an ex-con. And then Hoke is asked by his boss to pose as a bum in another county where he has no jurisdiction to "see what he can find" about a farm where Haitian immigrants are being killed--and he says fine, withoit barely an objection? And he leaves Alita, the baby, and his own two daughters home alone with the killer across the street? And--as part of this--Hoke's boss makes him hitch a thirty-mile ride to the town where the farm is located. Why not just drop him off a mile away? Is Hoke a character actor? The book rings so false in so many ways that Hoke would have called bullshit on the whole thing.

Both a fittingly ambivalent end to Hoke Moseley as a character and an odd duck of a noir plot with red herrings that take up huge swaths of the page count. The racism of the characters here feels a bit too infectious to the book in general to be a total recommend.

Painfully weak final book in the Hoke Mosley series. I enjoyed the other three last year, as each featured Willeford's lovely prose and a likable, if not entirely redeemable, protagonist in Mosley. I liked his curmudgeonly ways, particularly in relation to his police partner / room mate Elita. The first, second, and third books had central mysteries (or in the case of 1 and 3, villains) that kept the story moving. "The Way We Die Now," despite a stellar title, just sort of shambles along from one event to the next with no real direction before an ending that serves to set up more stories that were never told. I can't hold it against Willeford for never writing more before he died, but it makes for a really anti-climactic story in this specific novel. The undercover stuff is really underdevelped and not too interesting, either. Oh well.