Rating: 
Summary: heavy on ambiance, light on credibility
Review: 'The Last Good Kiss' is a difficult book to review. Judging by its plot, a complicated and over-blown private eye adventure, this book is at best average. But despite this 'The Last Good Kiss' is a rather memorable (if insignificant) piece of hard-boiled fiction. Why? Well...
Firstly, the book just oozes with 1970s ambiance. Yes, everyone is drunk and over-sexed. Lots of driving around with no concern of fuel economy. The language and 'attitude' of the times are captured perfectly. This is due in no small part to the deceptively effortless prose. It's all very literate without feeling like (stuffy) literature.
Secondly, 'The Last Good Kiss' has some of the most strange and perverse characters imaginable. They seem like refugees from some bad early 1970s movie. Yet, somehow, they sustain the reader's interest long after the plot has fizzled out (..about halfway through).
A few words on the plot? Let's see. Private eye hired by attractive woman to find no good ex-husband. Private eye then joins ex-husband to find missing daughter of a barmaid. Jump to vignettes involving porno, drugs, sex/sex/sex and some violence, and that's about it. Of course it seems everyone falls in love with our private eye ... go figure.
Bottom line: ridiculous story more than salvaged by memorable characters and 1970s nostalgia.
Rating: 
Summary: meandering read
Review: After reading the glowing reviews, I thought I would be in for a mesmerizing journey. Sorry to say, I would only classify it as meandering. The hardboiled protagonist is witty, but his manner is laconic and there is little forward thrust to the story. Yes, there are some 'surprises' and suspense, but the rhythm is (no doubt purposely) brusingly slow. One can sense the intelligence and dilligence in the author's efforts, but the book, as a whole, was not compelling.
Rating:
Summary: A great book.
Review: And it is a genre that I don't usually read. A pulp fiction (not the movie, the style) style book with substance
Rating:
Summary: The best opening sentence of any hard-boiled mystery.
Review: Aside from having the best opening sentence of any hard-boiled mystery, The Last Good Kiss is a classic mystery. Down-on-his-luck detective searching for Hemingwayesque author who, entangled in the battles of the bottle and of writer's block, has dropped out of sight. No less than three women in the author's life (ex-wife, current wife, and mother) alternately hire, thwart, entice, seduce, reject, and otherwise befuddle the hero-detective. Lots of drinking, lots of road trips in the majestic Northwest, and fantastic writing from Crumley
Rating: 
Summary: Why not a movie?
Review: Bruce Willis, James Woods et. al. why have they not picked up on this classic? Fairly low budget and a couple sequels to boot.
Rating:
Summary: Don¿t Judge This One by the Cover
Review: By the drawing of the bulldog on the most recent cover, one might mistake 'The Last Good Kiss' for a cozy, cute mystery. That would be a mistake of monumental proportions. 'The Last Good Kiss' is a hard hitting, gritty, graphic hard-boiled novel about some pretty nasty people doing some pretty nasty things. It's also exceptionally well written.C.W. Sughrue, a Montana P.I., is hired to track down a drunken writer. He finds his man, but along the way Sughrue takes another case, a case he knows will lead to nothing good. His job is to find a girl who ran away from home many, many years ago. The hunt for the girl leads Sughrue through a parade of despicable degenerates with no redeeming qualities. It can be a hard novel to read and a difficult one to forget. In Sughrue, Crumley has created a detective who lives in a broken world, hoping that there might just be one good thing on the horizon, one good reason to live, one good thing to believe in. The settings, characters, tone...it all works, establishing the novel as one of the greats in the hard-boiled mystery genre. But again, if you are looking for a nice, cozy mystery to curl up with for a relaxing evening, this is not for you. Definitely not for kids. 244 hard-boiled pages
Rating:
Summary: Don?t Judge This One by the Cover
Review: By the drawing of the bulldog on the most recent cover, one might mistake `The Last Good Kiss' for a cozy, cute mystery. That would be a mistake of monumental proportions. `The Last Good Kiss' is a hard hitting, gritty, graphic hard-boiled novel about some pretty nasty people doing some pretty nasty things. It's also exceptionally well written. C.W. Sughrue, a Montana P.I., is hired to track down a drunken writer. He finds his man, but along the way Sughrue takes another case, a case he knows will lead to nothing good. His job is to find a girl who ran away from home many, many years ago. The hunt for the girl leads Sughrue through a parade of despicable degenerates with no redeeming qualities. It can be a hard novel to read and a difficult one to forget. In Sughrue, Crumley has created a detective who lives in a broken world, hoping that there might just be one good thing on the horizon, one good reason to live, one good thing to believe in. The settings, characters, tone...it all works, establishing the novel as one of the greats in the hard-boiled mystery genre. But again, if you are looking for a nice, cozy mystery to curl up with for a relaxing evening, this is not for you. Definitely not for kids. 244 hard-boiled pages
Rating:
Summary: A 1970s detective out of the Old West
Review: C.W. Sughrue is not politically correct, not worried about offending anyone's sensitive nature. No pretense at a morality tale here. C.W. is a loner and a cowboy, not sociopathic just asocial. A hard-boiled detective in the classic mold of Lew Archer, Sam Spade, Philip Marlowe, Travis McGee. Roaming the west, from Montana to Sonoma, Oregon to Denver, C.W. drinks, fights and fornicates (loves doesn't describe him) his way across the back roads and highways of a western wilderness landscape, with only occasional stopovers on the margins of civilization, in desperate pursuit of whom and what he has, at best, only a vague notion. Crumley has a talent for story-telling but tends to stretch credibility (C.W.'s El Camino, 454 V8 under the hood, can out-corner a Porsche Carrera - I don't think so). Reader advisory: members of N.O.W. need not bother to open this book, there is no feminist view of the world herein. Crumley is to be recognized for his craft, but he is not, as some have advertised, the best in this genre (compare to, for example, Raymond Chandler's "Farewell, My Lovely", similar story, better result). The story starts wearing thin about half-way and the quality of the writing fades before the end.
Rating:
Summary: A hardboiled must read.
Review: Characters you love and dislike at the same time. Beautifully written complex plot takes you along all the way. Powerfully ends the only way it could have.
Rating:
Summary: Rocky Mountain Noir
Review: Crumley is one of the great, underrated American writers and this novel is his masterpiece. Tough and tender, he captures the spaces and hard-bitten culture of the Rocky Mountain region of America like few others. Plus, this novel has one of the greatest endings you will ever read; it will knock you on your rear and put a tear in your eye. Absolutely required reading for people who think the detective novel can be literature.
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