Amos Walker has made a lot of friends - and a few enemies - in his years as a detective in Detroit, but he has never had to deal with quite the trouble he finds when he agrees to grant the deathbed wish of Beryl Garnet. Beryl was a madam with a long, successful career. She's got no regrets about that, but she does about her son. She hasn't seen him in a long time and would like him to know his mother never forgot him. So she asks Walker to make sure that her son gets her ashes when she's gone.
He obliges her, finding her son, who has been in Canada since the 1960s, evading the law since he was a Vietnam War protester. A simple favor, melancholy, but benign. Except that before he can get settled back in Detroit, Garnet's son is dead, and Walker is the prime suspect.
He has little choice but to find out who might have done the deed and tried to pin the blame on him...and in the process he discovers another murder, of a prizefighter from the 1940s. Curtis Smallwood was the father of Beryl Garnet's son. And if that wasn't bad enough, the two murders, fifty-three years apart, were committed with the same gun.
Mel Foster reads Estleman's quintessential noir story in a Philip Marlowe-esque style, adding drama and mystery to the streets of Detroit and Toronto. The world-weary first-person narration marries well with Foster's deadpan delivery. A former madam, Beryl Garnet, asks Walker to deliver her "cremains" to Lance West, her adopted son. Walker's investigation is described through wisecracking repartee and well-honed prose in the finest tradition of the genre. Listeners will enjoy the evocative mood of the mystery, as well as Foster's superb gritty delivery. Imagine plumes of smoke and whiskey bottles in desks and glove compartments. S.C.A. (c) AudioFile 2004, Portland, Maine
About the Author
Winner of three Shamus Awards for his Amos Walker novels, four Golden Spur Awards for Western fiction, three Western Heritage Awards, and many other awards for his other fiction, Loren D. Estleman has also been nominated for the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize. Poison Blonde (2003) was his fifty-first novel. He and his wife, author Deborah Morgan, live outside Detroit, Michigan.
