The Long Fall by Walter Mosley

I'd never read anything by Walter Mosley before, but I've lately been more and more interested in hardboiled crime fiction, and had been curious about this new series about an aging, hard-drinking, ex-boxer New York P.I. named Leonid McGill. McGill has spent most of his career working for criminals, involved in countless shady deals, wrongly setting up innocent people, taking bribes from hitmen, and so on. Now he wants to change "from crooked to slightly bent." Flawed characters are always more interesting than "good people," so the bad guy as the hero angle works pretty nicely. I wouldn't call it a masterpiece but I enjoyed the book and look forward to the second in the series, Known to Evil.