I read this dude-penned book because my dad recommended it and because the next book in the series includes an encounter with Jennifer Miller, a favorite performer of mine and the person who conducted my wedding ceremony.
I liked the mystery part of the book okay and found the ending to be surprising, in a good way, but I wasn't crazy about the author's voice. The problem could be that he is writing about a neighborhood I have lived in for twenty years and have strong feelings about, and his perspective is different (and NYPD-ier) than mine. I'll try to explain, using some quotes from the book:
These two blocks of Orchard between Rivington and Delancey are all that's left, an anomaly in a neighborhood whose only purpose is to provide a backdrop of authenticity for fake dive bars, pricey restaurants and whitewashed boutiques.
How many blocks are there between Rivington and Delancey? Also, the neighborhood's only purpose is servicing rich hipsters and NYU students? Sure, that is part of it, but fuck you, that's not all we are.
"What kind of supermarket," asks O'Hara, "doesn't sell ginger?"
De Jonge spends much of the book ragging on the neighborhood for being too shi-shi, and then has a metal head cop look down on Key Food for not having a ginger (which, to my memory, it does) in stock the day before Thanksgiving.
UPDATE
Taken at the Key Food on Avenue A & 4th St. 10/19/12
...the most underrated perquisite of her sex, which is the ability to sleep uninterrupted for sixteen hours.
What? Seriously? Where on earth is he getting his intel? What? Seriously?
Some folks, thinks O'Hara, don't waste any time pulling the race card. Particularly ones who refer to themselves as "women of color." Sounds like a bad soul band.
So either the author or the character (or both) is racist, which is not particularly endearing.
A female Asian student wearing fashionable leather boots--two-thirds of NYU's students seem to be Asian girls--steps onto the checkered black-and-white floor of what must be the grandest ballroom in the city south of Grand Central.
Sexist, too, despite the female protagonist.
Even so, I'll read the next one, because I'm a little OCD about such things.