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I bounced off "The Maltese Falcon" but I thought I'd give this a go.

Much more my sort of thing.

I think Chandler's style allows you to have more feeling for the central character, I know that Dashiell Hammett gave Sam Spade no interior dialogue deliberately, but there's this lovely edgy flippant hidden bleeding heart to Philip Marlowe.

The plot barely hangs together but it's hard to notice that with all the characters being so richly drawn

I really need to stop leaping into series midway through. That being said, it felt like a nice balance between existing characters and ones just for this book. Demarkian's Cavanaugh Street neighbourhood feels like people I know and several of the "this mystery only" background characters, like DeAnna Kroll, feel like fleshed out people.

It's well-written and characterised, but the solution to the mystery is a bit of let-down.

Probably my own fault for joining mid-series but I felt this spent too much time on the character's personal lives. But it was all really well and sharply observed.