Man with an Axe

March 2, 1998
Two dead legends--real-life Teamsters boss Jimmy Hoffa and Jackson's fictional Grootka, the take-no-prisoners mentor of Detroit homicide detective Sgt. Fang Mulheisen--grab center stage in the seventh book in Jackson's lively, quirky series (after Dead Folks, 1996). The sound of jazz music (the titular "axe" is in fact a saxophone) also permeates the story: Grootka was a devoted fan, and Mulheisen so thoroughly shares his passion that he describes an attractive researcher who has a grant to dig into Grootka's past as looking like "the great Detroit jazz pianist Geri Allen. The same bright look, the vitality and obvious intelligence." The book begins on the day of Hoffa's disappearance--July 30, 1975--as gifted tenor saxophonist Tyrone Addison reluctantly rescues the labor leader from gangster assassins and hides him at his uncle's house on Turtle Lake, a resort favored by blacks in upstate Michigan. Twenty years later, long after both Hoffa and Addison have disappeared, Mulheisen finds a series of notebooks left by Grootka and reopens his late friend's investigation. The constant switching between the present, narrated by Mulheisen, and the past, told in the third person, gives the narrative a two-step jerkiness. But Mulheisen is, as always, a smart and mordant observer of his hometown's eccentricities, and Jackson remains a master of irreverent, hard-boiled comedy.