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Summary
Summary
Calling upon his considerable novelistic skills, Loren D. Estleman exposes the black heart of a seemingly stable, well-run city suddenly pitched into violence and chaos. A delicate balance of forces-greed and corruption, ambition and desire-run out of control in the wake of a serial killer's grisly rampage. A power struggle-between a police chief who has looked the other way for too long, a Mafia boss who holds the city's vices in his powerful grasp, and media reporters looking for a big story-turns what has been a minor dispute into a desperate struggle for survival. Setting this drama in a blue-collar metropolis dominated by an oil company, Estleman, with an unerring eye for telling detail and an ear for dialogue that reveals the secret desires of his characters, crafts a fascinating, deadly tapestry of love, ambition, revenge, and redemption, a stunning portrait of the human condition.
Author Notes
Loren D. Estleman was born in Ann Arbor, Michigan on September 15, 1952. He received a B.A. in English literature and journalism from Eastern Michigan University in 1974. He spent several years as a reporter on the police beat before leaving to write full time in 1980. He wrote book reviews for such newspapers as The New York Times and The Washington Post and contributed articles to such periodicals as TV Guide.
He is a writer of mysteries and westerns. His first novel was published in 1976 and since then he has published more than 70 books including the Amos Walker series, Writing the Popular Novel, Roy and Lillie: A Love Story, The Confessions of Al Capone, and a The Branch and the Scaffold. He received four Shamus Awards from the Private Eye Writers of America, five Golden Spur Awards from the Western Writers of America, the Owen Wister Award for lifetime achievement from Western Writers of America, and the Michigan Author's Award in 1997.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (4)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Shamus-winner Estleman, best known for his hard-boiled Amos Walker series (American Detective, etc.), creates a new, morally complex world in this razor-sharp tale of crime and corruption in a fictional eastern U.S. city. Gas City, once known as Garden Grove, has enjoyed stability as a result of understandings among the politicians, the police and the local gangsters. An enclave known as the Circle serves as the community's vice outlet, while the rest of the metropolis is virtually crime free. Police chief Francis Russell, after his wife's death, begins to question the devil's bargain he'd struck years earlier with mob boss Anthony Zeno. When Russell resumes acting like a lawman, virtually everyone in town feels the repercussions. Estleman masterfully creates a wide and diverse cast of characters, and sympathetically portrays their struggles to survive on the mean streets. A superfluous serial killer subplot doesn't detract from the author's achievement, which will justly be compared with that of James Ellroy's Los Angeles noir mysteries and John Gregory Dunne's True Confessions. Admirers of unsparing crime fiction will hope that Estleman plans to visit Gas City again. (Jan.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Kirkus Review
Portrait of a city by an old master. Police Chief Francis X. Russell has made his big, complex, oil refinery-dominated city among the most livable in the United States, according to some. He's also made a pact with the Devil, according to others. Newspaper publisher Joe Cicero puts the case this way: "Just because the trains run on time is no excuse to leave the crooks in charge." The crooks, in this case, are the Mafia, embodied locally by opera-loving Anthony Zeno, whose exterior only partially conceals the mind-set of an unregenerate killer. In cozy cahoots, the cop and the thug have long since arrived at an entente: Russell keeps his minions away from Gas City's seamy, steamy underbelly, aka the Circle, and in return he gets the rest of Gas City as a no-crooks zone, where wives, daughters and private property have been rendered sacrosanct. Moral codes aside, it's an obvious win-win situation. The bad guys roll in money; respectable Gas City breathes crime-free air. From time to time, it's true, there will be a bit of editorial fuming, but who takes newspapers seriously anymore? And then suddenly Russell's beloved spouse dies, leaving him bereft and rudderless--until, in some quite mysterious way, an epiphany happens. Russell becomes not only a changed man, but, to the dismay of certain entrenched interests--in and out of the Circle--a no-holds-barred reformer. Reprisals follow raids, of course, and respectable Gas City, its Edenic period a thing of the past, learns the hard way that honest government comes with a price tag. The chronically undervalued Estleman (The American Detective, 2007, etc.) serves up what just might be the best novel about urban political corruption since Dashiel Hammett's The Glass Key. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
*Starred Review* Francis X. Russell is Gas City's chief of police. For many years, he has maintained a gentleman's agreement with the local Mob boss, Anthony Zeno. The drugs, the illegal gambling, and the hookers stay within a small, clearly defined area of the city. In return, Russell receives financial consideration, and the city at large remains relatively crime free. When Russell's wife of 30-plus years succumbs to cancer, the chief has a crisis of conscience and begins raids into the restricted area. The repercussions are significant with a mayoral race approaching. Political alliances are altered, Zeno loses the endorsement of the out-of-town crime hierarchy to which he reports, Mob-controlled unions threaten strikes, and even the city's powerful Catholic church is knocked off balance. Mix in a serial killer dubbed Beaver Cleaver by the media and a doomed love affair between a disgraced cop and a hooker for what may be the prolific Estleman's most thought-provoking and emotionally engaging novel among the 60 or so he's written. Its subject is contemporary rust-belt politics as a human phenomenon and the way that a politician's compromises can affect both the citizenry at large and the individuals who make up that citizenry. Each of the half-dozen plotlines is executed flawlessly and presented in a context of moral ambiguity in which every choice whether self-serving or altruistic has consequences both good and evil. A magnificent crime novel.--Lukowsky, Wes Copyright 2008 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
The shades of Frank Norris and Upton Sinclair must have been looking over Loren D. Estleman's shoulder when he wrote GAS CITY (Forge, $24.95). Set in a Midwestern metropolis that grew up around a refinery, his muscular novel initially takes a long view of the cynical bargain struck between civic leaders and organized crime - and only moves in for the kill when a key figure in this devil's dance decides to reform. Like earlier muckraking writers, Estleman is always looking for the tipping point where our frontier values of independent entrepreneurship and community justice tumble into criminality. And his characters never stop asking whether it's possible to go back and get it right. Everyone in Gas City seems to be in on the deal that keeps crime and vice confined to 10 downtown blocks, well away from the commercial and residential districts. Francis X. Russell, the corrupt chief of police, is actually best friends with the mob boss Tony Z. But when Russell's beloved wife dies, he goes into mourning for the lost ideals of the generations of immigrants who built his working-class city and resolves to make peace with his conscience. Police raids close down the most notorious criminal establishments. Illicit income dries up for gangsters and cops on the take. Fortunes shift in the coming mayoral race. But once the delicate powersharing mechanism held by Gas City's legal and illegal bosses breaks down, so does municipal order. At this point, Estleman has to ask whether one crooked cop's personal reformation is worth the chaos it causes. It's a loaded question, since the author has made individual (and perhaps national) redemption his central theme, even to the whimsical point of extending it to a serial killer known as Beaver Cleaver, who has shifted his pattern of butchery. ("My theory," a criminal profiler says, "is he's trying to cut down, like a smoker or an alcoholic tapering off his intake until he's beaten the addiction.") While this parallel plot isn't entirely integrated into the main story, it lets more raffish downtown characters into the mix, adding their irreverent voices to the higher debate over how much it profits a man to build a shining city and lose his faith in himself. Before she loses her nerve in a way that a true queen of the night (like Ruth Rendell or her alter ego, Barbara Vine) never would, Minette Walters spins a gripping tale of suspense in THE CHAMELEON'S SHADOW (Knopf, $24.95). Sticking to her habitual method of storytelling, Walters draws all eyes to Lt. Charles Acland, a 26-year-old British soldier who is gravely injured but escapes death after his armored vehicle is obliterated by terrorist bombs in Iraq. From the time he's first met, badly disfigured and sullenly silent on a hospital ward, Acland commands our attention, which only intensifies as he reveals the anger, grief, guilt and rage that torment him. Walters's portrait of this wounded soldier is so persuasively shaded that when he comes under suspicion as a serial killer we're forced to examine the existential question of whether a personality can truly be destroyed - and what that says about military combat. Unhappily, the story's sensationalism undermines this character study, while the procedural format, with its routine police work and inept cops, only distracts from the deeper issues this psychological thriller raises. The perverse tones of Madeline Dare rake their fingernails across the mental blackboard in THE CRAZY SCHOOL (Grand Central, $23.99). And how nice it is to hear that rebel voice again. After making her nervy debut in "A Field of Darkness," Cornelia Read's renegade debutante took to the hills of New England, and here she is in 1989 in the Berkshires, teaching at the Santangelo Academy, a "therapeutic boarding school" for the troubled progeny of the filthy rich. In addition to appealing to "all manner of seekers and lost boys, wild girls and pagan sprites," and those misguided souls who would teach them more practical social skills, the region also attracts a murderer who kills two students and makes the deaths look like a double suicide. Only the iconoclastic Madeline, who really cares about her vulnerable charges, is skeptical enough to see through the sham. While hardly taxing, the whodunit plot is funny and twisted, and it gives Madeline plenty of opportunities to air her caustic views on the evolutionary decline of her social class. As alluring as it is disorienting, THE RISK OF INFIDELITY INDEX (Atlantic Monthly, $22) introduces American readers to Christopher G. Moore's exotic private-eye mysteries set in Bangkok and featuring an American expatriate named Vincent Calvino. While hard-pressed to maintain his own moral ballast within this permissive society, Calvino has a sense of irony that allows him to work for ex-pat wives who want sordid proof of their husbands' infidelity in the Thai capital, which ranks No. 1 internationally as the "hub of marriage destruction." But this cynical private eye also has a streak of integrity (and a need for cash) that compels him to take up the cause of a client who was murdered when he tried to expose a case of drug piracy so farreaching it could bring down the government. Although the tone of the narrative is slightly off - the general satire seems a bit too blunt, and downright mean in its specific consideration of those expat wives - Moore's flashy style successfully captures the dizzying contradictions of this vertiginous landscape. In Loren D. Estleman's latest novel, a corrupt chief of police tries to make peace with his conscience.