Snitch Jacket by Christopher Goffard
Benny Bunt is an ex-speed freak, a helplessly dominated husband, a misfit on the sun-bleached, fog-drenched streets of Southern California, and a barfly who makes pocket money snitching on his friends. You'll like him. When Benny comes across Gus 'Mad Dog' Miller, wearing a neclace of human ears and throwing his Vietnam war medals against the wall of his favourite bar, he knows they're going to be firm friends. But soon he finds himself at the centre o fa mysterious double murder in the lonly Mojave Desert... Snitch Jacket is at once a detective story whose deeper mysteries are the nature of friendship, machismo and identity, and also a scabrously comic send-up of noir fiction. Snitch Jacket was a finalist at the Edgar Awards for Best First Novel.