Devil in a Blue Dress by Walter Mosley

I thought I'd read some of Mosley's stuff, on the grounds that it is generally recommended. This one's certainly a good hard-boiled novel. Easy Rawlins is an interesting detective too - in this first story, he's a recently fired factory worker and takes on the detective work essentially at random.

Once it gets going, the usual sort of violence and chaos surrounds him. The one thing that was perhaps too much are the terrible revelations that in the end lie beneath everything - and they sure are terrible.