Loren D Estleman
Private eye Amos Walker is a Vietnam veteran who was thrown out of the Police Academy for punching a fellow cadet. He’s a hard man in a ruined city, scratching out a living looking for lost things.
Walker’s latest case comes by way of ex-mobster...
2) Angel Eyes
After a tour in Vietnam and several years working the streets of Detroit as a private investigator, Amos Walker has seen a lot. But he's never encountered anything quite like his newest assignment. Ann Maringer, an aging stripper hard at work at one of the city's many...
At the turn of the twentieth century, Detroit is still decades away from becoming the “Motor City.” The budding manufacturing town is little more than a confederation of tightly knit ethnic enclaves, ruled over by men like Abner Crownover III, horse-coach baron, and James Dolan, a portly...
5) Edsel
It’s only been two decades since Connie Minor was on top, but it feels like centuries. Once a journalist, Minor spent Prohibition with his finger on gangland’s pulse, a confidant of every rumrunner, boss, and triggerman in Detroit. But as the gangsters fell, Minor went with them,...
Even prison couldn’t stop former big-league pitcher Doc Miller from playing baseball. Jailed after a teenage girl overdosed on cocaine at one of his house parties, the former Detroit Tigers ace became a star at the Michigan State Prison, bringing home the institution’s first Midwestern Penal System championship. Now out on...
7) Motown
Rage simmers beneath the tranquil surface of 1960s Detroit. As the auto industry enjoys its last moments of prosperity, widespread discrimination infuriates the city’s black middle class. One of the most destructive riots of the twentieth century is around the corner, and Rick Amery is going to be...
9) Midnight Man
A routine case puts Amos Walker on the highway to Ann Arbor, but the trip turns deadly just a few miles outside of Detroit. Tailing a trucker suspected of faking hijackings, Walker does his best to keep a safe distance, but is recognized anyway. The trucker runs him off the road, and...
10) Jitterbug
As the United States enters World War II, Detroit converts its factories to an “arsenal of democracy,” fueling the American war machine. The city’s sons leave to join the fight, but one man does not follow. Declared too unstable for combat, he steals an Air Force corporal’s uniform. Using...
11) Book Club
Good Advice, New Mexico, is a sunny town with a gloomy bookshop. The store's eerie corridors are the province of Avery Sharecross, an ex-cop who has made the transition from chasing killers to tracking rare books. One afternoon, the local sheriff interrupts his book club meeting, and Sharecross's old career collides with his new one. The area's premier book collector...
Hired by a curator at the Detroit Institute of Arts to serve as his bodyguard during a transaction involving a stolen illuminated manuscript, Amos Walker enters a darkened skin-flick theater where the exchange is supposed to take place. When the deal goes south, he’s lucky...
13) Sinister Heights
Leland Stutch was building automobiles before Henry Ford ever dreamed up the Model T. He dominated Detroit for most of the 20th century as the auto industry soared and then began its long, slow descent. When Stutch’s widow contacts Amos Walker, the private eye...
On screen, Sandy Broderick is everything a newscaster is supposed to be. He has a deep voice, a ten-thousand-watt smile, and the God-given ability to banter with weathermen until his ears fall off. But when the cameras turn off, he has a private problem:...
15) The Stranglers
Between your last prayer and the snap of the rope there's no time for mercy...
The first victim was cut down from a limb outside Fort Benton. The second, bound and strung up in Bear's Paw. Now, Deputy Page Murdock has discovered two more men swinging from a hanging tree among the aspens along the Missouri River. They aren't drifters. They aren't bandits. They're the law. And like every man with a badge, they're
...16) Stress
For Paul Kubicek and the city of Detroit, 1972 ends in a haze of blood. A police officer in need of extra work, Kubicek spends New Year’s Eve moonlighting as a security guard at an upscale Grosse Pointe party. Just before midnight, in the sea of white faces, he sees three black men, a shotgun,...
Enter Valentino, a mild-mannered UCLA film archivist, buys a decrepit movie palace and uncovers a skeleton in the secret Prohibition basement. He then makes a second discovery: long-lost, priceless, reels of film: Erich von Stroheim's infamous Greed. The Los Angeles Police Department wants to take the reels as evidence, jeopardizing the precious old film. If Valentino wants to save his find, he has only one choice: solve the murder within
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