From Amazon.com
More than two decades after his introduction in
Motor City Blue, Amos Walker is still the same cynical, computer-illiterate, lone-wolf Detroit private eye he always was. He hasn't even bothered to update his hard-boiled patter. "I got out of the robe and into the shower," Walker explains partway through
Sinister Heights, "scraped off the Cro-Magnon growth of the night, put on a fresh suit from the cleaners, and drove to the office, where I sat around making a good impression on the walls until the telephone rang at ten."
However, it's the pairing of unreconstructed gumshoe with modern malevolence that makes Loren Estleman's stories interesting. In Sinister Heights, Walker is hired by the fetching young widow of powerful auto maker Leland Stutch. She wants him to locate her hubby's illegitimate offspring so she can share with them her inheritance--and thereby avoid future lawsuits. But the would-be heirs have troubles beyond the monetary. Stutch's granddaughter is on the run from an abusive spouse, and Walker's efforts to help her only lead to her son's kidnapping, the violent death of one of the PI's oldest women friends, a cinematic assault (by 18-wheeler trucks) on a suburban car factory, and a surprise Stutch progeny who hopes to capture all of the late magnate's millions.
Estleman's cops and politicians are caricatures, and he doesn't give his protagonist much emotional complexity (though Walker does bare a bit of beating heart in this book's fine closing sequence). But he makes up for these faults with his polished plot, a talent for fleshing out characters with a minimum of words, and a robust nostalgia for Detroit's heyday that almost makes you think fondly of belching smokestacks. --J. Kingston Pierce
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
From Publishers Weekly
In Estleman's 15th lively novel to feature Detroit PI Amos Walker (after 2000's A Smile on the Face of a Tiger), Walker is hired by the young widow of a recently deceased multi-millionaire centenarian who wishes to mitigate the sexist offenses of her former love-'em-and-leave-'em spouse by sharing some of her millions with his victims. Even some of Estleman's own characters find this hard to believe. Not impossible, mind you. Just hard to believe. For the first third of the novel, veteran noir fans will understand that Amos is being set up for a double-cross, which comes in the form of a lethally souped-up pickup truck barreling down on him on the highway. One of the women he was asked to find is killed, another hospitalized and her child abducted. What's going on? And who's behind it? Unfortunately, the answers to these questions and the means by which Amos discovers them are as implausible as the rest of the story, and the violence involved in bringing the guilty to justice is ludicrous. On the positive side, when he isn't beating somebody up or being beaten, Amos is a most congenial host, given to witty banter with the rest of the cast; and there's Estleman's dazzling Detroit, its past, present and future. Estleman has written a lot of books, and Amos is sure to have a lot of fans who'll find his Rambo-like antics perfectly plausible. Whether they'll like this as well as the previous books in the series, they'll find it neither humorless nor dull.
Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
