The amount of violence in this book is indicated by one of the chapter names, “The Seventeenth Murder.” It's clearly significant as it's obvious the majority of film noir dialogue springs from this. Unfortunately, the writing is somewhat too “clean,” especially with the characters. They really aren't “sharply drawn” as they are all pretty one-dimensional. Like Tolstoy, he seems to like to change them when he sees fit: case in point the police Chief who behaves markedly differently out of convenience. This may be an important work, but I think it would work much better as a movie than it does as a novel. My dad thinks this is just like Blood Meridian but they couldn't be more different. McCarthy's book is about gnosticism, this is just a very violent detective story.
