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I love the whole Hoke Mosely series and wish there was more! I listened to this, love listening to crime noir read aloud. I’ve heard 3 of the 4 Mosely books read aloud, just started the 4th.

Best of the Hoke Moseley novels so far. I’ve got one left, but this’ll be hard to top.

Alternates back and forth between two unrelated stories until a violent intersection at the end. Funny, strange, and twisted.

Nobody writes ‘em like Willeford. His third Hoke Mosley thriller captures his one-of-a-kind voice at every turn: The pitch black humor, the lurid depiction of Miami, the male lectures, the careful attention to detail. It’s a book that tells the parallel story of two men who become unmoored from their regular life, and develop coping strategies that are at once carefully considered and glaringly stupid. It’s light on action until the very end, where it becomes a fairly straightforward, gritty police procedural. It doesn’t walk the same high wire between realism and parody that the first two books do, but it’s still wonderfully entertaining. And what a great last line!

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.”

Pitch black but excellent

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.

Good reading and great craftsmanship!

Hoke does it again ! The not perfect detective whit a wit for irony and to much problems on his own still does well

Sideswipe , the third book in the Hoke Moseley series, finds Hoke at a crossroads in his life and unsure of what he would do if he quit the police department. While this one continues Hoke’s character study, it rolls into the criminal’s character study while setting up the crime mystery. It reminded me of book one in the sense that is a fifty-fifty split between the good and the bad guys.

My rating is less than average for this one and it boils down to the fact that I didn’t find that much appealing about the criminal in this book, unlike Junior who featured in book one. And the focus solely on Hoke with his daughter’s and partner being mostly sidelined didn’t help maintain my interests. It wasn’t a bad book by any means; I just didn’t enjoy it as much as the first two books (which is kind of funny since some reviewers felt this one was the best in the series thus far).

Tightly written, it’s another tribute to Willeford’s worth as an author.

The third in Charles Willeford’s Hoke Mosely series, and by far the best of the three, the best written, where Hoke’s character is well-fleshed out (and he’s out of shape, too). I’m not saying that there aren’t pleasures to be had in the reading of the first two, Miami Blues and New Hope for the Dead, for sure. I much prefer my mysteries with angst and anguish and existential dread, but this one clearly highlights the funny stuff and I laughed quite a bit, actually. (Laughter needed in conjunction with US inauguration, and related issues). I couldn’t help see Hoke as Paul Giamatti, who was also in a popular movie, Sideways, and Hoke’s life is going sideways here, too, for most of the book.

In this one two main separate plotlines converge; in the first, Hoke, overworked, has a kind of breakdown and “retires” (takes an unpaid leave) from the Miami police force to manage an apartment building for his father Frank on Singer Island; one daughter drops out of high school to work in a car wash, the other may have an eating disorder. He’s broke, disillusioned. He still has a house he is renting with his eight-month-pregnant (police) partner, Ellita Sanchez.

The other plotline involves a retired auto worker, Stanley, who ends up in jail, wrongfully accused of molesting a minor, and there meets a psychopathic lifetime criminal, Tracy.

“What’s a psychopath, Tracy?” the old, trusting Stanley asks.
“A psychopath makes no distinction between right and wrong.”
“You mean you don’t know the difference?”
“No, no! I know the difference, I just don’t give a shit.”

The old guy wants a more interesting life so agrees to the more edgy life of crime. He listens for hours to Tracy, a pretty funny smooth-talkin’ philosopher psycho who befriends and takes him in on one of his robbery schemes (gone wrong), also undertaken by a disfigured stripper who can’t dance and a terrible artist, which then involves Hoke’s partner getting shot, the crime roping Hoke back into policework.

The conclusion is suddenly more serious and violent than I expected, given the humor of the book, but well done and satisfying. What I noticed is that both Hoke and Stanley are both lost sideways American guys, and so finally there’s really a kind of existential undercurrent Willeford accomplishes, and we like both these schleppy guys.

I libri di Charles willeford sono sempre i più adatti a rilassare la mente e a mettere di buon umore. Scrittura veloce, per niente pesante, personaggi a volte improbabili che rendono il libro divertente. Un detective che riesce a risolvere sempre i casi e a fare la cosa giusta.

I really liked this book. The understated way he describes the life of Hoke and the life of Stanley, as a matter of fact, that it is natural to behave the way they do. The result is a very unusual crime novel.
Hoke a police detective and Stanley a retired factory worker who unwittingly gets pulled into a life of crime.
Interlaced with all kinds of witty society critical remarks.

Hoke's and Stanley's characters and life is very well fleshed out. We know that this will not end well. The lead up to the final climax takes the majority of the book but I didn't mind at all. In a very entertaining way we get there and then it goes very quick.

Two story lines.

One with Hoke as the central character. It's written with dry wit and humor.
Very intriguing course of events. Good story.
With Hoke Moseley at the centre. An improbable hero. Reluctant detective who is burned out and wants to retitre. But when he takes over his fathers apartment complex as a manager, trouble follows him.
How this played out is superbly described. The colour locale of Singer Island enhances the athmosphere of the story.

In the other story line we follow Troy and Stanley. Experienced from Stanley's point of view.
Great insight and conversation between our main villain (the self proclaimed psychopathic career criminal) Troy Louden and the naive, gullible seventy-one year old Stanley Sinkiewicz. They meet in jail and Troy gives Stanley advice how to handle the inevitable psychological assessment. Stanley being in jail, is based upon a misinderstanding, but Troy is a different story...
Troy also turns out to be a life coach for Stanley. He has his own life philosophy to which he abides.
The reader will sense that this will lead to disaster...

Written: 1987
Charles Willeford: 1919 - 1988