Burning Midnight

Starred review from April 16, 2012
An unusual client hires Amos Walker in Edgar-finalist Estleman’s outstanding 22nd novel featuring the Detroit PI (after 2011’s Infernal Angels). Walker’s longtime friend and professional ally, Insp. John Alderdyce “of the Detroit Police Homicide Division,” is worried about his son’s Mexican brother-in-law, Ernesto Pasada. Pasada has started hanging out in Detroit’s Mexicantown with the Maldados, a gang “with a branch office in every city between here and Juarez” and no scruples about killing cops. Alderdyce wants Walker to somehow make the Maldados believe that keeping their hooks in Pasada is more trouble than it’s worth. The inspector gives the PI a plausible cover story for poking around Mexicantown, but soon after Walker does so, the bodies start to fall. Estleman offers one of his cleverest solutions to the whodunit, which is no small achievement and another sign that his font of creativity remains full. Agent: Dominick Abel, Dominick Abel Literary Agency.

May 1, 2012
PI Amos Walker is waiting for winter to give up its hold on Detroit when Louis Pearman walks into his office. Pearman is a television-news talking head who once was a damn good reporter. He wants Walker to get his son's brother-in-law out of a local gang. Walker usually finds missing folks and brings them home if they want to come home. This is different. It's also a lie. The kid in the gang is no relation to Pearman. In fact, he is related to Inspector John Alderdyce, of Detroit Homicide, a sometime friend, sometime adversary of Walker's. Alderdyce's son married a Mexican woman, and her 16-year-old brother is caught up in a dispute between two murderous gangs, the Zapatistas and the Maldados. Walker agrees to help but soon wishes he hadn't. Death precedes him, and bodies wash up in his wake, not to mention a bounty on his life. The twenty-third Walker novel is the usual engaging melange of tough-guy dialogue, violence, and sharp plotting delivered through a haze of cigarette smoke and cheap whiskey. Got a problem with that, pal?(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2012, American Library Association.)