Fun hardboiled thriller in the style of early Spillane. Guy Redding is a detective who's going through a bad patch after his last peep-job ended with his client murdering his cuckolding wife. To make matters worse, Guy took the opportunity to cuckold the client himself, and now the client, who, oh yeah, is a mobster, has a grudge against him.
But all that is prologue. The story begins when Guy, while stumbling home from a night of drinking, discovers the titular naked dame, beaten and bloody hiding in an alley. Being a man who is not himself mean, Guy takes it upon himself to find what happened to her.
But this is the dark city, and nothing is ever that simple. Before long, Guy's been crossed, double-crossed, and triple-crossed.
The book, as with all good pulps, is short and to the point. Bovberg's taken Elmore Leonard's advice and didn't write any of the parts that everyone skips. The plot moves through its convolutions at a fast pace, and builds to one hell of a climax. My only qualm is that I figured out the set-up about twenty pages before Redding, though I must note that Redding was drunk and more than a little messed up by that point.
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