They Don't Play Stickball in Milwaukee

Dylan Klein, insurance investigator cum novelist, returns home from Hollywood to attend his father’s funeral. After the burial, Klein learns that his nephew Zak is missing. Unable to get satisfactory answers as to the whereabouts of his son, Klein’s older brother, Jeffrey, enlists the aid of Dylan and Dylan’s most trusted friend, retired NYPD detective Johnny MacClough. They soon discover Zak’s trail is not only icy cold, but paved in layers of blood and intrigue.

Their search leads them to a tranquil college town on the Canadian border. There, they stumble blindly into an underworld of murderers and international drug smugglers. Even as they pick up faint traces of Zak, MacClough is haunted by the specter of a twenty-year-old kidnapping case that had catapulted him to the rank of detective.

Distracted by his grief and the search for Zak, torn between his loyalty to MacClough and his desire for truth, a vulnerable Klein falls under the spell of a mysterious young woman. But is she what she claims to be, or she too have her own dark secrets? And what of the genius computer hacker Klein takes on in order to find his missing nephew? Will these desperate measures lead to Zak or to disaster?

They Don’t Play Stickball in Milwaukee is both a taut thriller and an exploration of the ties that bind. Where do love and allegiance end, and where does the truth begin? These are the dilemmas Dylan Klein must face.

It's been one of those weeks for Dylan Klein. He's called home from Hollywood, where his pitch for a movie based on his latest detective novel has been going nowhere, to his father's funeral, and then he's called away from the funeral to search for his AWOL nephew Zak. Dylan's the natural person to look for Zak, because the two have always marched to the same different drummer, but now things aren't looking so good for anybody on Zak's wavelength. Valencia Jones, one of Zak's fellow students at Riversborough College, has been railroaded into a serious drug charge, courtesy of a killer cache of a new designer drug called Isotope, not to mention that a retired cop who's been nosing around her case turns up dead. When Zak asks too many questions at Riversborough without saying please, he's locked up with a cellmate who's obviously coasting on Isotope and feels so good that he won't mind becoming the next casualty. Meantime, Dylan gets the word that Zak's ex-lover Kira Wantanabe, the Riversborough student who's jumped Uncle Dylan's bones, may be a working-girl. Should he ask for her hand (and so on) in marriage, or turn her over to the vice squad? For the first half of Dylan's third manic saga, Coleman (Little Easter, 1993, etc.) spins out lovely, dirty complications with a fine sense of galloping paranoia. It's only when the bill for all this binge plotting comes due that the tale falls short. -- Copyright ©1997, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.