Excellent 3rd entry in the series

Alan Sepinwall, my favorite TV critic, has a running gag in his columns where he talks about how he’d like to see a character from whatever show he’s reviewing have a spin-off where they do banal tasks relational to the character’s motives. My personal favorite was the suggestion that goofy Justified gangster Wynn Duffy get a series called Wynnipeg in which he gets continually frustrated at teaching Canadians how to be criminals.

At any rate, three books into the Hoke Moseley series and I feel like this one, as well as its immediate prequel, are basically a Sepinwall spinoff series come to life.

Miami Blues, the first one in the series, was one of my favorite novels I read in 2018. A raucous, hilarious crime thriller, pitting cop and criminal in the worst game of cat-and-mouse ever. As I had already read, and loved other Willeford works (Cockfighter was my favorite crime read of 2017), I fast tracked the Hoke Moseley on my ever expanding TBR list.

Sadly, the second one New Hope for the Dead did not meet expectations. There were funny gags and Willeford is great at writing characters and creating a lived in Miami, even if its cynically presented. Most of the novel was about Hoke dealing with family issues and solving a rash of uninteresting crimes on the side.

When this one began with Hoke being sidelined from his family, I liked where it was going but sadly, it soon circles back into family stuff, with a parallel story of the criminals getting ready to commit The Big Crime. When the two finally intersect near the end, it’s great. The last forty pages are wonderful. But for the most part, Sideswipe is a remix of New Hope with a better ending.

Instead of getting “Hoke Moseley, curmudgeonly Miami detective”, I’m getting the spinoff series where said detective helps people do mundane stuff in their daily lives. Willeford’s such a great writer that I find myself enjoying this nonetheless. But it doesn’t make for a great story, definitely not a great crime read at least. And that’s fine. It’s just a little disappointing.

♫ This Was the Dawning of the Age of Shaniquius ♫

My second time through this one and I didn't like it much this time: too much "The Human Side" and "Family Man" backgound-story of the cop. It was like some TV show, maybe that Hill Street thing every jackass was raving about in the 80s.

But it wasn't as bad as Hoke Moseley #2. And Troy is every bit as nasty as Junior from #1.

Still too much Cuban crap. I live here; whole years go by without anyone thinking about Cuban crap -- especially the lame food that only a guilty conscience would gush over. I should go into more detail about this, but it would be wasted on you Seinfeld fans. So no gazpacho for you.

This book was written at the very beginning of the Diversity Craze and Willeford probably thought he was onto something here. He was being nice about it and all Diverse and all; the old look-how-unracist-I-am we see all day long, but nowadays you'd go to jail -- in Canada, for example -- for most of the stuff he says. Here too, soon. For our own good.

He was onto something, it was the Dawning of the Age of Shaniquius.

The best of the first three Hoke Moseley books. Great stuff.

I read this when it first came out in my late teens, I didn't get it, but thought like the whole series it was something special. Re reading it now as an old fart I get it and its brilliantly humorous, has a lot to say about older men and life in general and how we cope with it.
That said do not bother to read this book if you are under 40, save it. 50 would be best.

Midlife issues, a really fun psycho with a great cast of supporting characters, and imo the best book in the series.

Rentner unter (abwägigem) Pädophilieverdacht trifft auf durchgeknallt brutalen Berufsgangster mit Umgangsformen. Töchter im Haus. Auszeit / Burnout für Hoke. Erfolgloses Bemühen um Leben-Umkrempeln (Hausverwaltung für den reichen Vater). Groß wie immer. Fünf Sterne!

I like a story that goes 65 mph in a 55, and this one is pushing 40 in a 55. It’s the minutiae that killed me though. A lot a lot of detail, even in the dialogue, and there was a point to it and a payoff, but I wasn’t in the mood to settle in and pass that kind of time with these characters, not right now.

Great stuff. You get the sense that Willeford almost resented the borderline commercial success of his Hoke Moseley books, and enjoyed rubbing unsuspecting readers' faces in the dirt... not to mention screwing with his publishers!

Crass but perversely satisfying downward social comparison

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 have the Book Club Edition of this book published by St. Martin's Press in 1987. This is my first Hoke Moseley novel. The story started slowly for me, but the author writes with such rich detail and the characters are so quirky that I got hooked. Towards the end I couldn't put the book down for long. Using the contrast between the voices and actions of Troy Louden (a bad guy) and Stanley Sinkiewicz (a not-so-bad guy), the author takes jabs at parts of society. I think the author is a bit of a fatalist. I enjoyed the book and plan on readig anothr Hoke Moseley novel. I didn't enjoy Hoke as much as the other colorful characters; he was more interesting at the beginning of the book when he had all his problems than at the end when he had healed and rested up.

The description on the back of the jacket begins with the line, “There comes a time in every detective's life when he's had enough.” After reading that, and not knowing anything about the character, Hoke Mosely, you might assume this story was about a law and order man pushed to the edge of sanity by the degenerate dredges of society, akin to a right-wing revenge fantasy like Clint Eastwood as Dirty Harry or Charles Bronson as Paul Kersey in Death Wish. You’d be wrong, kind of, but you’d also be pleasantly surprised.

What pushes Hoke Mosley to the edge isn’t so much the scum of the earth committing senseless acts of depravity—although there’s plenty of this; Willeford is delightfully unafraid of being politically incorrect in his depictions of police life—but more mundane, everyday problems: a teenage daughter who wants to drop out of high school, another daughter who develops an eating disorder, busywork at the office, financial strife, and a pregnant roommate/coworker who eats her eggs in the most excruciating way possible. All this leads Hoke to a nervous breakdown that takes him out of Miami and back to the sleepy rural Florida vacation community he grew up in, charged with only the mundane tasks of maintaining his father’s hotel in an effort to “simplify his life.”

Meanwhile, adopting the same parallel narrative structure from Miami Blues, Willeford introduces us to Stanley, a retired auto-worker who disowns his family after they fail to rush to his aid when he’s falsely accused of molesting a child, and Troy, a self-described psychopath who enlists Stanley’s aid to get out of prison and later recruits Stanley for his gang/family (Troy also admits to being an admirer of Charles Manson), along with a struggling Barbadian painter, and an emotionally damaged and physically deformed stripper.

The middle of the story dragged a little, and at first the premise of Hoke having a nervous breakdown seemed a little forced, but by the time you reach the climax, almost everything seems to come together brilliantly. Willeford has a gift for using minute but bizarre details to either set up jaw-dropping plot twists or hilarious diatribes that seem to stem from his own cynical grievances. Without giving too much away, the robbery gone awry—again an element repeated from Miami Blues—is one of the best, and most brutal chapters of crime fiction I’ve ever read. It might be his personal history as a decorated combat veteran, but the man knows how to write a gruesome gunshot wound.

What I didn’t like: If there’s one criticism I have, it’s that he writes pretty weak female and minority characters. A reoccurring theme between this book and Miami Blues is whores who are good at housework, weak-willed and irrational, they sit around being told what to do by a man who abuses and exploits them, although this could be Willeford commenting on the degrading effects on the psyche of life in the sex industry. Or he could just be a misogynist.

What I did like: The parallels. He jokes about this with a throwaway line in the last chapter, but I really enjoyed the way Willeford juxtaposes events in Stanley’s/Troy’s timeline with events in Hoke’s. He emulates but differentiates the climax and the ending of this book from the ending and climax of Miami Blues. Ellita, Hoke’s partner, attempts to apprehend Troy by the book, firing a warning shot when she attempts to apprehend him, and she’s punished for this, but when Hoke encounters Junior at the end of Miami Blues, he takes the law into his own hands, executing him coldly and deliberately. At the beginning of the book as Hoke’s family falls apart, Troy’s family assembles, and at the end of the book as Hoke’s family rejoins in resolution, Troy’s family disperses in bloody carnage. We’re left not entirely sure if Troy really wanted to live happily ever after at The Hotel Oluffsson (I’ve been there!) with his family/gang, or if he merely snapped when a seemingly routine robbery went haywire due to mundane details overlooked, thus serving as a callback to the inciting incident of Hoke’s nervous breakdown.