Never Street (The Amos Walker Series #12) - Hardcover

Estleman, Loren D.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0892966335 ISBN 13: 9780892966332

Publisher: Mysterious Press, 1997

Synopsis

The award-winning author of Edsel brings back celebrated Detroit detective Amos Walker for his first case in seven years as he investigates a missing gangster movie fanatic who crosses the line between art and reality.

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Reviews

Amos Walker, waiting in the wings ever since Sweet Women Lie (1990) while Estleman worked on his epic cycle of Detroit crime novels (Stress, 1996, etc.), is back--back to the 1940s, it seems, since his search for video producer Neil Catalin, whose quiet demeanor masked an obsession with film noir classics, takes Walker chasing down the same rain-soaked streets. Walker's client, Catalin's wife Gay, wonders what his former mistress, two-bit actress Vesta Mannering, knows about his disappearance, even though she swears she hasn't seen him for over a year. Walker wonders what Catalin's partner, Leo Webb, knows about the meeting Catalin stalked out of right before he stepped off the edge of the earth, and when it is that Vesta's ex, the Shotgun bandit who went to jail when he wouldn't tell the cops the location of his $92,000, will be out on the street again. The natives on Mackinac Island, where Catalin's psychiatrist Ashraf Naheen plies a busy trade in upscale headshrinking, wonder how long it'll be before Naheen's secret videotapes of all his sessions lead to fireworks. And the police wonder how many more corpses they'll be finding before they can bring the missing Catalin to book for a series of murders Walker's convinced he hasn't committed. But the answer to all these riddles may just be on-screen--in the 50-year-old Dick Powell suspenser Pitfall--for all to see. Detroit's summer of power outages provides a brilliant backdrop for Walker's Chandleresque storytelling at its most gaudy and orchestral, with enough lush villainy for three ordinary novels. -- Copyright ©1997, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Detroit p.i. Amos Walker returns after a lengthy hiatus. As he investigates the disappearance of a businessman obsessed with gangster movies, Amos finds movie-type suspects: a cold wife, a luscious mistress, and a deceitful business partner. Classic work.
Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc.

What a wonderful premise: Neil Catalin is obsessed with film noir and imagines himself a character like Dick Powell in Pitfall, lured from his suburban cocoon by a sultry femme fatale. Inevitably, he twists life to imitate art and turns up missing, disappeared into the VCR, as his wife speculates. She's right, at least metaphorically. Hired to find Catalin, Detroit private eye Amos Walker, himself something of a hard-boiled anachronism, follows the trail into a disorienting world of noir characters wandering the '90s in search of 1952: the femme fatale, slightly miscast by Catalin but trouble nonetheless; the frustrated wife; even the crooked psychiatrist (a Raymond Chandler staple). Estleman ingeniously interweaves the real-life noir imitations with scenes from the movies themselves, producing a novel that is part parody, part tribute. Noir aficionados will love it, as will Walker fans, who have been waiting for the detective's next case since 1990. Bill Ott

Edition details

• Publisher: Mysterious Press
• Publication date: 1997
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0892966335
• ISBN 13: 9780892966332
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 341