I kept telling myself all the way through, 'remember this is a genre novel', but in the end it didn't help enough. I quite enjoyed the sleuthing, the sleazy bars, the drinking and the alcoholic bulldog. But I didn't like the sexism. C.W, hired to find a drunken author, becomes obsessed with a girl who disappears, following her trail through the worst kind of depravity and feeling bad for her and her mother. And yet he feels nothing for the 'sad young whore in a trailer-house complex out on the Nevada desert' who he 'humped'. All the women want to sleep with C.W. and all of them seem to want to get thinner, dress in sexier clothes and put on make up just for the men in the book.
(The book does have a brilliant title though.)
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