Hey authors! Want to sell more copies of your book? Just follow Nic Pizzolatto's simple example and create a hit TV series for HBO that captivates the public. Then sit back and watch the sales increase. (It'll help if you get Matthew McConaughey on board in the midst of an astounding career turnaround.) 
 Roy Cady is having a very bad day. First, he finds out that he's dying, and then his criminal boss tries to accelerate the process by setting him up to be murdered. Roy manages to escape New Orleans but picks up a stray teenage hooker named Rocky along the way. Although his plan is to simply run and find a place to die in peace, he finds himself reluctantly bonding with the girl, and she accompanies him as he holes up in Galveston, Texas. 
 I was prepared to work hard at trying to separate this from my True Detective expectations, and I was pleasantly surprised that it wasn't such a chore after all. From its violent opening to Roy's drunken brooding later in the book as he contemplates his own mortality and what life will hold for Rocky unless he can help set her on a different path, this turned out to be remarkably good noir. The grunginess of the settings as well as the crap hands that both Roy and Rocky were dealt in life make this feel like a story about small time losers, and asks if it's possible to ever break that pattern. 
 There are some things that will jump out at True Detective fans. Roy cuts up beer cans and folds them into the shapes of people, and part of it is told from a future perspective and filling in the gaps between the two is part of the structure. 
 Perhaps the biggest TD element is in the way this ends. (view spoiler)[Interviews with Pizzolatto made it clear that one of his big themes for the show was that it was metafiction commenting on the way that Rust and Marty were storytellers building a narrative. That becomes an interesting element here because Roy does not turn into an action bad ass as you would expect. He doesn't go after Stan for trying to kill him at first, and chickens out and does not seek revenge for Rocky or what was done to him later. Instead his moment of heroism is in giving Tiffany the truth. He tells her the story of her early life because he can't stand to lie to her, and it's in that last painful act that he achieves some redemption before the end. (hide spoiler)] 
 So while you won't get a nihilistic detective talking about how time is a flat circle, you will get a very good crime story with a protagonist who has his own kind of darkness.