A review by paulataua
Eight Million Ways to Die by Lawrence Block

4.0

A prostitute asks Scudder to help her to leave her pimp. His intervention seems to have worked, but then she turns up dead. It might seem like a fairly straightforward detective procedural, but it is anything but that. The murder inquiry is both the least important and the least satisfying part of the novel, It’s the characters and their lives that underpin the story that work for me; a hooker that quotes John Donne, an almost sympathetic pimp who happens to be a recluse and a connoisseur of African masks, and Scudder himself, an ex-cop who is fighting his own demons and spends a fair amount of the time at Alcoholics Anonymous meetings while on the case. I loved it despite not really appreciating the solution to the crime.