DOWNRIVER

by Loren D. Estleman ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 1, 1987

Detroit shamus Amos Walker is now back for an eighth taut yet broody investigation. And again there's both a close-up of a Detroit locale--this time it's the car-factory sprawl ""downriver""--and a digging, into a swatch of dark, not-too-distant past. Walker's new client is huge, black Richard DeVries, just released from prison after serving 20 years for tossing a Molotov cocktail during the '67 riots--supposedly as part of a gang that pulled off a $200,000 armored-car robbery. DeVries admits tossing the bomb. But he swears that he had nothing to do With the robbery, that he was framed. And now he wants compensation from the thief who framed him: one Alfred Hendriks--a student back in '67, but now top lieutenant to charismatic Timothy Marianne, the Iacocca-ish mastermind of a reviving automotive empire. With help from unlikely sources (including a 100-year-old auto-biz titan), Walker gets the goods on Hendriks--only to find him murdered in an elevator car. There's computer evidence that the slick exec was stealing his boss blind and cheating investors. So Walker, whose elusive client is now a murder suspect, has lots of lines to pursue--including Hendriks' relationship with Marianne's sexy, aggressive wife. The plot, though unfolded in a shrewdly oblique way, is basically a bit thin and predictable in its slightly gothic twists. And, as usual, Walker's hard-boiled narration sometimes strains too hard. (A stairwell is ""bleak as a banker's compassion."") But, if less impassioned and less vividly atmospheric than Estleman's best (Sugartown), this is solid work from a reliable producer in the R. Macdonald mode.

Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1987

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: -

Publisher: Houghton Mifflin

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1987

Categories: FICTION