From the Noir Vault: English writer Robin Cook (no, not the medical thriller writer) took on a pseudonym annd broke every taboo in the book. His nameless police detective is a nod to Hammet’s Continental Op with existentialist gloom and brutality ramped up to the nth degree. The murder victim that his unnamed protagonist investigates is clearly based on the writer's own life, so this odd, brutal and defiant police procedural becomes a thinly disguised autobiography as we read further. Suprisingly warm and humane, if not human.