Block's narrative techniques in this novel constitute almost a change of genre. He is no longer writing the traditional hard-boiled detective novel in which the detective preserves some integrity and humanity in the midst of a savage world. The novel is closer to a revenge fantasy. If it were set in the future, it would be a dystopia; as it is, it is a vision of a nightmare world, in which everyone is a killer or a potential killer.

The novel returns to a character from the first Matt Scudder mystery, In the Midst of Death (1976): Elaine Mardell, a prostitute whom Matt patronized, protected, and treated as an informant. In the earlier mystery, Matt concluded that everyone is a little on the take, but that murdering someone is crossing the line into evil. A Ticket to the Boneyard erases that line. Matt tells a police lieutenant in Ohio...