Loren D. Estleman - Böcker

Once, there was a world where the heroes were defined by their white clothing and the bad guys always wore black. The town sheriff always gunned down the wild gunslinger while the lady in distress cowered. The Indian was to be feared, not understood, and the white man always saved the day. This was a more innocent time. This was the traditional Western. But times change, as did the Western. The evolving Western is told from the point of view of blacks, Native Americans, Hispanics, Asians, Jews and Gentiles, Mormons, Catholics, women and men. It is about America, it is about life. Whether a story's central element is a hangman or a midwife, a piano or a cowboy who hates tomatoes, you may be certain of one thing, if the tale reflects an expanding continent, it reflects the American West.

Amos Walker is on the case of the aging pulp fiction writer Eugene Booth who has run out on a publishing deal that was supposed to revive his one-lucrative career. Plunging into booth's seedy world, Walker's chase eventually brings him to a lakeside bungalow in Michigan where he finds Booth pouding out his first novel in a decade with the aid of a 50-year-old Smith Corona and a bottle of Bourbon. The writer reveals to Walker that the events recounted in his long-ago bestseller, Paradise Valley, are a lie, and that the truth will be told in his new book. But when Walker returns to see Booth again, he finds the voelist hanging in the bathroom...and the pages he has written missing. Now it is up to Amos Walker to find the truth behind the supposed suicide of a belatedly honest man and to fulfil the victim's last wish - to share that truth with the rest of the world.

The undertaker practices the Dismal Trade with consummate skill. He has raised it to an art through the high craft of the Connable Method. He has transformed the ugliness of death into a thing of dignity and beauty. Victims brutalized by war, street fights, fires - every hazard in a raw West - in his hands, become presentable. Everywhere on the frontier he offers his skill: to the rich of San Francisco, to Kansas cowboys, outlaws, soldiers, and sheriffs. He is devoted to dignifying the dead. The undertaker's wife waits, she weaves, she builds. She is devoted to making her marriage whole, in spite of the tragedy that surrounds it; and most especially in spite of the tragedy that strikes at its centre one terrible afternoon. The undertaker is called to disguise the suicide of a famous financier. It is high drama, for only his art can save America's financial markets. His task on this day is secret, an act of understanding and dedication. In the end it is the undertaker's wife who, through love, is able to transcend death.

Amos Walker, the quintessential hardboiled detective, is mortal after all. Jeff Starzek, an old friend who smuggles cigarettes for a living, saved Amos Walker's life, bringing him to a hospital after Walker took a bullet to the leg. A month later, Walker, still convalescing, gets a panicked phone call from Starzek's sister. Jeff is missing and the leads are few. One lead is Homeland Security agent H. Clemson. The Fed also seeks Starzek, whom he believes may be working for a counterfeiting operation with ties to terrorists. Though Walker doubts Starzek is a terrorist, he finds blank treasury paper at an evangelical church belonging to Starzek's brother. Then Starzek's brother disappears too. Back to square one, Walker follows his best hunch, driving Starzek's usual cigarette route along the Lake Huron shore, and finally gets a solid lead on the paper hangers. But before Walker can break the case, someone tries to shoot him-and he's accused of murder. In the end, Walker will need all of his fortitude to stay alive long enough to figure out who's doing what to whom, in time to save his friend's life.

Amos Walker’s Detroit visits dozens of unforgettable locations from Loren D. Estleman’s Amos Walker series. As Estleman says of Detroit in the preface: "It’s a hard-boiled town, and the crumbling buildings and rusting railroad tracks of the warehouse district, the palaces across the limits in Grosse Pointe, and the black-hole shadows of the Cass Corridor were made to order for a remaindered knight chasing truth through a maze of threats, deceptions, and inconvenient corpses. City and protagonist are cut from the same coarse cloth. They are the series’ two heroes."Amos Walker’s Detroit allows Estleman’s settings to take center stage as noted photographer Monte Nagler turns his lens to Estleman’s various noir locations. Some locations are well-known landmarks, like the Renaissance Center, the Wayne County Building, Belle Isle, and Mexicantown, and some are fictional locales such as Walker’s home and office. Even when the locations are familiar, Nagler’s lens renders them in fresh and unexpected ways. Excerpts from Estleman’s novels describing the locations accompany each image and Estleman’s thoughtful introduction contextualizes the images and comments on the role of Detroit as a noir backdrop.The photographs in Amos Walker’s Detroit show the city in a new light, demonstrating that Detroit’s grit and glamour coexist in unexpected places and make a perfect setting for a mystery. Fans of the Amos Walker series, as well as those interested in photography, architecture, and local culture will appreciate this handsome volume.