As I approached the end of Jordan Harper’s “A Violent Masterpiece,” this year’s buzzy crime novel, I was surprised—slightly disoriented, even—by the presence of an unexpected feeling on the page: hope. (In “A Violent Masterpiece,” he quickly winds up dead in jail.) Harper has been widely fêted by both critics and his fellow crime writers. When “A Violent Masterpiece” came out, in April, the Times Book Review dubbed it “the noir novel for our times.” Is Harper, like so many noir writers before him, raising our hopes for the express purpose of dashing them against the rocks?