Doll heads to the junkie shanty towns of Washington state in search of the missing woman, getting himself involved in a series of violent confrontations that Ames handles as satisfyingly as Lee Child. The prose carries a charge without being self-conscious: the weltschmerz is pleasingly plangent; the spiralling mayhem of the plot beautifully orchestrated.

I didn't find a lot of offbeat humor such as was promised in the blurbs but Happy Doll, the non-licensed private investigator, is certainly quirky which I like.

What was going to happen in the fourth season, or the movie, which I think would've been fun visually, is that Jonathan [played by Jason Schwartzman] wanted to finally become a licensed detective. To become a licensed detective, you had to have been in law enforcement. So he was going to join the police academy, so we would've seen him wearing this blue outfit, training to be a cop. I don't know where I was going exactly with the Ted Danson and Zach Galifianakis characters. But I think I was going to have them become roommates because the George character [played by Danson] had lost all his money. They moved in together, and I was maybe going to have them living in Staten Island. Maybe George was going to have a podcast that was going to be called a "potcast." But this was what I was thinking however many years ago. Who knows where those characters would be now? The character of Happy is excellent, ex-military, ex-cop, ex-PI, but still working. He is broken both inside and out, but still has a sense of justice so when he has the chance to save Ines once again, he is on the case. It is not until you see Happy’s relationship with Ines that you realise how messed up he is.His love for her seems to be based in the fact that she is the one person more broken than he is. As the story progresses, Happy reveals how bad things have gotten. His sense of balance fails completely, and you have a character driven by a form of madness, doing what it takes; drugs, violence, murder. It does feel in places that as an unfit man in his 50s, Happy may be pushing his body too far, but the book takes on a HI octane, technicolour tone unlike any PI book you have read.

With this first slice of Los Angeles Noir he has certainly cultured a memorable beginning. It is quite evident that Ames is tipping his hat to the traditions of LA PI fiction introducing his main protagonist through a first person narrative in an approach reminiscent of Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler. Yet there is plenty of flavour, quirks and unexpected moves in a novel that shows some light amon But Doll is not without his own demons, as he is a slave to his drug habits such as cocaine. He has experienced his own brutal assaults and scars from his life, and he considers himself an “armchair Buddhist,” He does have a best friend name George, who happens to be a dog. It seems one of his few friends, because Doll does things his way, and barely asks for anyone to help him or understand him. Mr. Ames has also written a TV pilot for the HBO network, Bored to Death, and this will be filmed in the fall of 2008. The pilot will star Jason Schwartzman as "Jonathan Ames". Bored to Death was originally a short story by Mr. Ames which was published in McSweeney's #24 (fall 2007).Happy Doll has now embraced his absurd name and dropped the “Hank” that he went by for years, and he’s getting in Buddhism (the title is a reference to the wheel of dharma as well as a pun on the idiom the wheel of justice), so there’s a little character development going on.