The Devil Knows You're Dead by Lawrence Block

 

This turned out to be a clever and occasionally funny detective novel, with some reasonable twists and turns and suchlike along the way. Block could write funny with a distressingly casual ease, but he could also see things you might not have notices and phrase them in ways you might not have thought of--he could do that sort of cleverness without being exactly funny, and he did it well, and a lot, in this novel. I presume it's intended to be happening in the early 1990s, when it was written (I generally tend to presume that fiction is set when it's being written, unless there's a good reason to presume otherwise) and New York then was a somewhat grittier place, and many of the attitudes were really unfriendly--at least some of the words were (there's a transwoman who gets talked about in some kinda jarring ways to 2026 sensibilities, but she's always referred to as "she," which for 1993 is really progressive). The prose is sharp and sparkles like quartz, the characters are deeply believable. Really, really good, and it makes me wish the local libraries had more of Block's novels from the 1980s and 1990s as physical books, so I could read them.