I enjoy reading Ray Garton's books. He does a good job of blending tense, violent situations with well-built characters, then adding a healthy dash of sex to spice things up. Some might say a dollop of sex. In TRAILER PARK NOIR, Garton nicely combines trailer park trash with pulp noir. Oxford Dictionary defines noir as "a genre of crime film or fiction characterized by cynicism, fatalism, and moral ambiguity." Apply that definition to a trailer park environment and it perfectly sums up the mood of the book.

Marc Reznick is a private investigator getting over his girlfriend's suicide; he lives in unit nine. Right next door is Anna Dunfy and her teenage daughter Kendra; Anna is a single mom, working temp jobs and stripping at night to take care of her beautiful and mentally handicapped daughter. Mix in a pornographer in unit five and a drug dealer in unit seventeen and you know some significant drama is going to happen. Each of these characters and more exhibit the cynicism, fatalism, and/or moral ambiguity mentioned in the definition above.

The biggest problem that I had with the book was the character change that Reznick went through in the last third of the book. The pieces were there for the shift but at the same time, it was pretty sudden. For most of the book, he was a decent guy; he had problems and demons to deal with but he mostly had them under control. Then he takes care of a problem for Anna and suddenly flips as if a switch in him went off; his personality significantly changes from before. At that point, he was an arse and deserved the fate he received. As the title suggests, the book is not deep literature. What the book is though is fun and enjoyable and very satisfying. ( )