13. The Hit by Brian Garfield

I found this in near pristine condition (though faded with age, it appeared that it may have never been opened or at least barely) in a small used bookstore in Nashville.  I quite enjoyed Garfield's Death Wish and he is part of that small group of crime fiction writers of which Donald Westlake is the most famous that made their mark on the genre in the 70s and 80s so I had to pick this up.  

This is one of those thin novels of the past, with a simple premise and a quick resolution (at least compared to the tomes of today).  Simon Crane is an ex-cop somewhere in the Southwest (I suspect a secondary city in Phoenix) who gets sucked into the aftermath of a robbery on a mob safe (and the disappearance of the mobster whose house it was in).  His connection is that he had an ex who was the secretary at the house who discovered the place robbed and was too scared to go the mob bosses and went to him instead, making them both suspects.

The plot itself didn't grab me that much.  I can't quite put my finger on it, but it felt like it kind of went in various directions with new characters popping up but none of them having that much meaning to the protagonist or the crime itself.  When he finally does figure out who did the job, it's not all that interesting.  What was really good in this book was the location.  His description of a desert town that is evolving economically from a kind of shitty backwater to a more respectable and wealthier retirement and tourist area was really well done.  The city itself and the desert outside it are evocatively described as are the various weird characters who live there. The Hit, written in 1970, feels predictive of the desert noir mini-trend that would come two decades later to the movies.