From Publishers Weekly
Sleek plotting and an abundance of small diversions brighten Raleigh's second tour of Chicago's ethnically mixed Uptown area, which is guided by the tough-talking, loudly dressed shamus Paul Whelan. Two years separate the death of a struggling computer software specialist and the recent killing of a cheap bookie. But the latter was bookie to the businessman, the businessman's former partner has mysteriously moved on to bigger successes and the two men died at nearly the same location. The businessman's widow hires Whelan to investigate the partner, and soon the PI is trailing missing accountants and bald bruisers who cruise Rush Street's singles bars at night. While working in unofficial tandem with cop Al Bauman, whose attraction to violence is matched only by his thirst for booze, Whelan romances a pretty waitress and keeps a watchful eye out for a car of rednecks who seem intent on harassing the racially mixed couple who lives across the street. Raleigh, who delivered the goods in his debut novel, Death in Uptown , shows no signs of faltering.
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Kirkus Reviews
Convinced that the killing of hoodlum wannabe Harry Palm on Chicago's waterfront is somehow connected to her husband's apparent suicide in the harbor two years earlier, wealthy, brittle Janice Fairs hires self-doubting ex-cop Paul Whelan (Death in Uptown, 1990) to take another look at the financial fortunes of High Pair, the software company that Phil Fairs had run together with slick Rich Vosic--whom Janice accuses of her husband's murder--until embezzling accountant George Brister took off, leaving the partners holding the bag. En route to a neat solution, Whelan finds time to protect a hooker from a conventioneering pharmacist, break up a cross-burning on his neighbor's lawn, mix it up in a bar brawl with his loose-cannon police buddy Al Bauman, make cautious time with a smiling waitress, and get under Vosic's skin but good. A shaggy, satisfying valentine to Chicago's seedy uptown. --
Copyright ©1993, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.
