Number 45= Hammers on Bone - Cassandra Khaw

The hard boiled detective story is one of the most enduring tropes in fiction. It's also the one that seems to be riffed on most commonly in other genres. We have a large assortment of magic users who happen to be hard boiled Private eyes- the Dresden Files being probably the most popular.  Then there's Charlie Huston's series about vampyre detectives. I have one somewhere about a zombie detective. Eric Garcia has the Rex series where the narrator is a velociraptor disguised as a human (and they're actually really good)...
 

I didn't think there were any varieties left.

Then came this book. The mash-up we never knew we needed.  Hard-boiled detective, Cthuluesque ancient gods and magical London…

A young boy hires the narrator to kill his stepfather.  His stepfather is a monster he says, and our narrator is the man for the job because he’s a monster as well. This paves the way for a surreal trip through a very recognisable London, albeit a London filled with strange creatures hiding in human skins, chasing a very non-human foe which is spreading a pestilential force. When the hard boiled narrator is a Lovecraftian ancient one in a borrowed skin, you know you're in for a weird ride.

As expected from Cassandra Khaw, the prose is unmistakable.  Her off-kilter writing style seems to work fantastically well when she’s talking from the POV of a weird creature, so it works fantastically well here.

The London setting feels anachronous to the American PI/killer for hire stereotype that the narrator appears to be disguised as, but this adds to the unsettling nature of the book. 

It’s a quick and surprisingly easy read with a real hard-boiled gumshoe feel to everything despite the ever-increasing supernatural content. It's a truly mind-bending book. You will find yourself asking WTF on many occasions.  Khaw’s imagination is on a high octane mix of something very weird in this book and it works beautifully.

I was on the fence about Khaw's books after Nothing but Blackened Teeth. But with this and The Salt Grows heavy it's clear that the wilder the story, the more her style matches it.