The Cut by George Pelecanos

 

This was a pretty decent crime novel, in some ways pretty thoroughly in a vaguely noir tradition, in other ways very of its time (2011 copyright) with all sorts of very specific landmarks both geographical and social that have almost certainly shifted over the past fifteen years. It's also Book One of a series, which is often the one book to read in a series if you're going to read any, and I can sort of see some of the groundwork being laid for future novels. It's intermittently violent, most of the characters don't have a lot of inhibition about that, and there are indications that whatever good any of the characters achieve will be kinda minimal, which is definitely a noir thing. The prose is pretty decent, though there are all sorts of odd insertions where Pelecanos informs us of what things (such as Greek words) mean, where the people in the novel are eating and why, that sort of thing, as though he doesn't trust readers to either know those things or fill in some gaps; it makes for some weird juddering. The characters are pretty well-distinct, and the story is reasonably plausible (though events might have made parts of it obsolete). If I come across others of Pelecanos' books that aren't deep in one series or another I might give them a go, but I'm not going to be exactly looking for them.