This book should have been released on the Hard-On Case Crime label, not the one that it is! The author basically writes the smuttiest sex scenes he can, while slightly mentioning that a woman wants to hire someone to kill her husband. Sex scene after sex scene is occasionally interrupted by the crime subplot. And the sex scenes are super explicit! I mean, Penthouse Forum explicit! The author should have just gone for it in total, and skipped the murder for hire thing. As dumb as the main character is, he gets to have a lot of sex with many different women in many different ways! In super detail!
So, it's a pretty steamy sex book, but a crime novel, it is not.

“I knew better, but…”
“So many sad stories start with those four words.”

Man, ain’t that the truth! ( )

Really 3 1/2 stars. Don’t let the vintage look of the cover fool you, this is no 1950’s pulp book. It takes place in the 21 century and nothing is left to the imagination.
Doak, is a retired NYPD detective living in Florida and doing occasional private Eye work.
A woman tries to hire a hit man to kill her husband and Doak is used by the local sheriff to act as the hit man.
Doak falls in love with the woman and tries to figure out how to make it happen.
It helps that Doak is a total psychopath.
This book is a quick read, but if rough graphic sex is a problem for you, you will want to skip this book. ( )

The Girl With The Deep Blue Eyes (2015) by Lawrence Block. In this noir thriller you have two books in one. First there is the pulp fiction noir straight out of the 40’s of 50’s. There is a troubled leading character in the form of Doak Miller. Retired from the NYPD before getting the boot, and having received that self-same boot from his now ex-wife, Doak has set up shop as a P.I, down in Florida. Mostly he does the things he wants and every so often does a real job.
When the police ask his help in setting up a sting operation, he knows it never hurts to be on the right side of that equation. It was when he meets the woman who is trying to have her husband killed that he falls into the trap of the “Hot Dame” with fire in her eyes and a lust in her heart that equals his own.
Thus starts a series of events that brings him closer to the dark and the doom.
The other book is a sex thriller that would have captured my attention completely when I was a youth. Now it feels as if Mr. Block doesn’t entirely trust his new character to carry the plot by himself. In a way it is great reading a book where the author is certain of what he is creating, yet sad in that he puts the crutch of sex in to carry much of the load.
Still, it is a Lawrence Block novel and they can hardly be beat. Although you probably know the tracks this train is running on, the ride is always fun. ( )

If you enjoyed Double Indemnity but thought it would be better with "butt sex", then this is the book for you. ( )

Retired NYPD detective “Doak” Miller left his job for sunny small-town Florida, supplementing his pension as a part-time PI, performing background checks, routine insurance inquiries, and every so often, undercover work for the local Sheriff’s office, which is where the story begins. It is a fast read, and I read it in a little over four hours.

The wife of a wealthy businessman is looking to have her husband killed. The Sheriff wants Doak to play the part of hitman, get it on tape when she hires him to kill her husband, and accept a $1,000 earnest payment. Doak agrees until he sees the woman, and calls everything off. Her deep blue eyes do him in.

The Girl with the Deep Blue Eyes is short, written with a stark flair, and remarkably complicated. It is Doak Miller’s story, intimately told. The girl’s backstory is told as narrative cleverly disguised as dialogue, and it works.

Doak is devious, criminal, selfish, and, as the novel develops, his amoral character is expertly revealed. He is clearly a man already fallen. His destruction is self-inflicted, and the blue-eyed woman is the tool he chooses to use to destroy himself. In an homage to Jonathan Cain, it is a skewed version Double Indemnity, but here, the man is predator and the woman his willing accomplice. The book admirably plays off the old black and white film noir without losing its own identity and interest. Its plotting is disturbing because nothing is out of place or unresolved. There is an extremely heavy dose of erotica (at a level I was not expecting – this is pulp noir after all) and not a single likable character.

I really like and enjoy these books from the Hard Case Crime imprint, reprinting many of the out-of-publication classics, and interspersing them with new works by authors like Block, Stephen King, and many others. This one fits in perfectly amongst the classics: it’s sassy and dirty like you would expect. ( )