This experience reminds me why going back to reading an authors first book after reading a later book can be weird. There's almost always some tendencies I'm not excited to see.

I think the first published book by an author often shows the difference between the writer they think they want to be and the writer they actually become. In this case, having already read The Automatic Detective, which I liked a lot, there's a few things I could do without.

The insulting descriptions made the narrator sound like a mean high school student. The way the narrator describes the characters in the first few chapters seems like an attempt to get laughs off their physical appearance, and it mostly just seems mean. After a while I found myself saying, "I get it, she's overweight. Let it go."

The banter between Duke and Earl didn't go over much better. Anytime I started to get to like them, they cross paths and exchange some of the dumbest bouts of insult humor imaginable.

But, as I indicated, a lot of this burns off after the first act. I think a lot of writers have ambitions of being a stylist or a humorist, and lose track of that impulse when they grow more interested in things like advancing the plot and developing the characters.

Because by the end of the book I genuinely cared about the characters, and wished I had spent less time dealing with the early unpleasantness. By the end I was back to the A. Lee Martinez I was hoping for.

First books are usually weird, but it's good knowing it probably gets better from here on out.