The city is Los Angeles, the birthplace and terminus of the American dream, a city that has come to symbolize both heaven and hell. Billy McGrath is an enigma, half American, half English, who once dreamed of pursuing a career as an academic philosopher, but for the last fifteen years he's been a homicide detective, one of LA's best. He knows the rules, playing them perhaps better than anyone while understanding the reality of a justice system that doesn't always work, that punishes the underprivileged and lets the rich go free. He's a deeply unhappy, possibly suicidal man, divorced from a wife he still adores and separated from a ten-year-old daughter for whom he'd readily die. McGrath is called to a crime scene - a woman dead on a kitchen floor in one of the city's less than inviting neighborhoods, a seemingly routine assignment until he discovers that the murdered woman's son is LA's biggest crack dealer, an idol of the ghetto who offers him a one-million-dollar bounty for the name
From Publishers Weekly: Murder Book
Set in a monsoon-drenched L.A., Rayner's third novel (Los Angeles Without a Map) is a taut, intricately plotted thriller in which the city itself is suffused with miasmic evil. Everyone, from drug dealers to movie stars and celebrity doctors, is interconnected, and no one is really innocent. Half-British and educated in philosophy at an unnamed Cambridge-like university, star homicide detective Billy McGrath is divorced but still in love with his ex-wife. Desperate to atone for a past affair and to prove he can be a good provider for his 11-year-old daughter, Billy is ripe for the temptation that appears when the 45-year-old mother of the biggest cocaine dealer in town turns up murdered. Dealer Ricky Lee Richards offers Billy a cool million for the name of the killer. In Rayner's L.A., everyone and every crime seems to be linked: Ricky Lee, for example, associated with an O.J.-like movie star who killed his wife. The whole cityscape is pulsing, jittery, just this side of total anarchy. A not-guilty verdict in the movie star's trial shatters Billy's faith in the system. In a harrowing transformation, McGrath sheds his law-enforcing persona and becomes an avenger. He takes the money and schemes to set killer against killer, justifying the violence he spawns as good because justice has become a joke. While Rayner's prose is occasionally too hardboiled, as if it's parodying pulp detective novels, these missteps are rare. Mostly the novel has just the right punch, and its portraits of the contemporary American city gone bad are oddly moving.
From The New York Times: Books in Brief: Fiction
Billy McGrath is a hard-boiled L.A. cop who's down on his luck: his marriage has broken up, he's obsessed with his status as the city's top homicide detective, he's out of cash and his friends are turning against him. On top of all that, a bullet-ridden corpse has turned up, and it's not just any corpse: Mae Richards was the mother of Ricky Lee Richards, a much-feared gangster and drug dealer. As McGrath delves into the crime, collecting clues for his ''murder book'' -- the official binder of case-related material -- Richards offers him $500,000 for finding the killer, as long as he (or she) is handed over not to a jury but to the swifter justice of the gangster's Uzi. McGrath, previously incorruptible but thinking of his family's security and angry over what he sees as an unjust not-guilty verdict in a separate (but eventually related) murder, takes the bait, insisting on $1 million. And in the process he begins scheming to turn Richards against the defendant who was let off, an actor and playboy named Charles Corcoran. As this byzantine plot unravels, McGrath must face a host of new evils, from the ghosts of his troubled past to a very real and determined killer. Richard Rayner's third novel is tightly written, even if McGrath's offhand forays into philosophizing seem oddly out of place. Many of Rayner's characters are pure stereotypes, though some, like McGrath's ex-wife and the mild-mannered Dr. Richard Francis, Mae's secret lover, give this fast-paced procedural unusual psychological depth.
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