When knife-wielding street punks warn private investigator Malachy Foley against "bein' even close to happy," the message isn't about Mal's state of mind. Harriet "Happy" Mallory, a high-powered Chicago attorney with political ambitions, has just hired Mal to find her son, placed for adoption thirty-one years ago. Seems there's more here than just the late-blooming maternal interest Harriet claims.
Mal, fast on his feet and more quick-witted than prudent, follows the trail to a gentle woman headed home from prison, a beautiful woman headed nowhere but the grave, and then to Harriet's boy - trapped in a maelstrom of vengeance and death. Bad cops, tarnished priests, and Scripture-quoting killers stalk Chicago's mean streets together.
He ought to take time to salvage his own failing marriage, or maybe stick to playing barroom piano, but Mal presses forward into the center of a strange and violent vendetta. With a furious pace and meticulous plotting, David J. Walker gives us characters we care about and a vivid portrait of love gone wrong in this unusually accomplished debut mystery.

From Publishers Weekly:

This uneven first novel introduces Chicago PI Malachy Foley, a former lawyer, who hires on to find the son whom Harriet Mallory, a rich and influential attorney, gave up at birth 31 years earlier. Foley discovers that the son is a missing priest whose adoptive mother, a former doctor, is now in prison. While trying to find the priest, Foley is threatened, another priest is shot and a woman, who might be the missing priest's girlfriend, is found dead in a boat. As Foley's loyalties veer toward the priest and his imprisoned adoptive mother, his client, whose husband is a sleaze, reveals powerful political ambitions. The very gabby Foley also acts as factotum to a well-connected woman who lives in Evanston and plays jazz piano in a bar. The plot, hinging on a number of hidden and/or previous identities, is complex, but Walker, a former priest who now practices law, doesn't imbue his debut with a strong sense of place or offer a hero with a commanding personality.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Fixed in His Folly

Walker, David J.

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