The Confessors' Club

May 4, 2015
In Fredrickson’s complex fifth Dek Elstrom mystery (after 2013’s The Dead Caller from Chicago), somebody is murdering Chicago’s wealthiest movers and shakers in a manner that makes each death look like the result of either natural causes, suicide, or an accident. The police refuse to believe that this isn’t mere coincidence. When Wendell Phelps, the “head of Chicago’s largest electric company,” decides that he’s next on the list, he hires Elstrom to investigate. Elstrom fits the classic PI mold: a recently divorced recovering alcoholic with a weight problem, a shabby wardrobe, and a grubby residence. And it’s clear that the author is heavily under the influence of Raymond Chandler: “She took a slow look at the silver tape curling off the Jeep’s top and side curtains like a spinster’s hairdo gone wild in an electric storm, flicked the cigarette butt into the street and said she’d drive.” Fans of 1940s-era hard-boiled detective fiction will find a lot to like. Agent: John Silbersack, Trident Media Group.

May 1, 2015
Unlicensed Chicago shamus Dek Elstrom struggles to protect a man all too close to him who does his very best to fight any trace of protection. Far from taking it personally that Dek's job got her kidnapped (The Dead Caller from Chicago, 2013), his ex-wife, Amanda, wants to hire him to find out why utilities czar Wendell Phelps, the father who was estranged from Amanda for many years before bringing her back into his orbit to help run the city's biggest electric company, is so rattled that he's hired detectives and bodyguards as his share prices have dipped. Or rather, she wants Phelps himself to hire Dek so that he'll have control over what his ex-son-in-law learns. Phelps has never met Dek face to face before, but that doesn't stop him from opening their very first meeting by confiding in him that three other members of what Dek's well-connected friend Anton Chernek calls the heaviest of Chicago's heavy cream-heart attack victim Benno Barberi, cancer sufferer Jim Whitman, and Grant Carson, who was struck by a hit-and-run driver-were all murdered. What alarms Dek even more is that a fourth member of this charmed circle, Phelps' friend Arthur Lamm, has disappeared. That pattern spells danger for the Windy City's wealthiest. But when Dek tells Phelps that his suspicions were indeed on target and there's a killer out there, Phelps insists he was overreacting and takes Dek off the case. He can't know what every reader will: that firing Dek is like waving a red flag in front of a bull. The most densely woven of Dek's five cases to date, even though you may lose track of who's dead and who's not long before Fredrickson sounds the last trumpet.

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June 1, 2015
A setup to quicken the heart of traditional mystery fans: three elderly Chicago gazillionaires die under circumstances that hardly seem suspicious. One is felled by a heart attack, another by cancer, and a third killed in a hit-and-run. But their colleague, crusty old Wendell Phelps, is convinced these CEOs were murdered, and he's afraid he's next. Phelps' ex-son-in-law, the feckless insurance investigator Dek Elstrom, is press-ganged into poking into what Elstrom is sure is a noncase. To kill time, he gathers the dead men's appointment calendars. Damnedest thing! They all died on nights they attended mysterious C meetings. Elstrom's attempts to make the connections bring him in contact with some delightfully offbeat people. The best of them is the shadowy cop Delray Delmar, who sounds like a holdover from one of E. W. Hornung's early-twentieth century cracksman novels. The author tries for an actioner ending that isn't as intriguing as the C puzzlement, and we read patiently through gun battles and car chases to the good stuff: revelations about what these old pirates were up to and why they died. Straight-ahead mystery for straight-ahead mystery readers.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2015, American Library Association.)