The Dead Caller from Chicago

February 11, 2013
Near the start of Fredrickson’s lively fourth mystery featuring Chicago insurance investigator Dek Elstrom (after 2012’s Hunting Sweetie Rose), Leo Brumsky, a close friend of Elstrom’s, receives a cryptic phone call from a man long presumed dead—a call that prompts the fearful Brumsky to flee Rivertown, a benighted hamlet just west of Chicago, long a hotbed of petty crime (prostitution, auto theft, gambling) due to rampant police corruption. But the locals find they are merely amateurs in criminality when a series of grisly murders alerts them that the Russian mafia may be moving in. But what does the mafia want in Rivertown? In order to get to the root of the escalating violence, Elstrom begins an investigation that immediately puts him at grave risk. A tart wit, hair-raising action, and exotic characters, such as Brumsky’s engagingly eccentric mother and outrageously nosy neighbor, more than compensate for the convoluted plot. Agent: John Silbersack, Trident Media Group.

March 1, 2013
A mysterious phone call from a long-dead thief spells trouble for everyone in PI Dek Elstrom's neighborhood of Rivertown. The call, which comes to Dek's friend Leo Brumsky, must be potent indeed. It makes Leo turn white and go quiet. And when Dek, flush with the kind of optimism you can only get from listening to a first-class motivational speaker like infomercial personality Lester Lance Leamington, returns from an insurance-fraud case in Iowa two days later, Leo has vanished. So have his mother, his girlfriend and her mother too. Harnessing the skills that can barely keep him in Cheerios, Dek traces Endora Wilson and her mother to Eustace Island, miles from anywhere, but it's a bad mistake; his success has the downside of leading one of the men Leo was fleeing to their hiding place. And when Dek finally does catch up with Leo, he finds him standing over a dead man, a revolver in his hand. From that point on, the story, which entangles everyone who's ever worked for the Rivertown zoning and inspection office with a Brueghel painting that's been AWOL since World War II, devolves into a series of episodes in which guys follow other guys who are often themselves following still other guys, with everyone involved armed and dangerous. If the mystery is less than compelling, Dek (Hunting Sweetie Rose, 2012, etc.) continues to be good company, whether he's rescuing his ex-wife from kidnappers or playing a divorcing Hollywood couple against each other.

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March 1, 2013
Just outside Chicago, Rivertown appears to be a sleepy suburb built on hard work and good intentions. Not so much. More of a back room than a bedroom community, Rivertown, with its notoriously corrupt city government and proximity to the windy metropolis, attracts criminal heavyweights. When his best friend, Leo, disappears, Dek Elstrom, quirky private eye and amateur carpenter, descends from his peculiar habitat, an unheated turret, seeking answers. Although he dismissed it at the time, Dek recalls an unsettling phone call that Leo reported was from a dead man with links to the city garage where Leo worked as a teen. Then, too coincidentally, a city garage official is murdered, and everyone Dek interviews is being tailed by a gangster, cop, reporter, or all of the above. Dek knows the answers lie in the bizarre connections he's made between Leo's disappearance, the city's rapidly increasing murder rate, a missing painting, and the city garage. Fredrickson dexterously splices these seemingly incompatible plotlines into a sometimes gritty, often humorous, remarkably intricate puzzle complete with a cast of improbably realistic characters who never fail to entertain.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2013, American Library Association.)