Finished the year with a loser

I finished the reading year with a dud. It was my 27th book of the year. Would've been nice to finish on a nice round number like 26, but my desire to read overpowered my OCD.

If the title of the book is accurate, “Losers Live Longer”by Russell Atwood, then this book will live for centuries.

It was published by Hard Case Crime which is famous for its detective noir and good noir at that. How this slipped through the cracks I don’t know.

The plot was forced. The main character was a dud. I felt nothing for him. The author tossed in an odd sex scene out of the blue and a couple other comments that seemed totally out of the flow. And he ended his chapters with weird attempts at deep thoughts or something that were just dumb.

Like:

It gave me a chance to close my eyes and forget.

Sweet forget, how I missed you.

Or:

I turned away from it and walked east, following my shadow, a long narrow stain spilling out in front of me.

Dumb.

As you can tell, I didn’t like the book. Gave it a year-low 5 on the Haugenomter, out of 10.  Going back to one of my old faithfulls, Lawrence Block, to start 2018. He's never let me down.