DEAD MAN

Eddie Dain's career as a lighthearted player of games from chess to computer research and private investigations ends the night two goons—hired by somebody unhappy about the way Dain's been sniffing around a conveniently accidental death—kill his wife and child and leave him for dead. Bent on revenge, Dain resurfaces years later as a high-priced finder of unfindable people, waiting for a client shady and desperate enough to have hired his family's killers. But is that client Teddy Maxton, a mob-connected Chicago investment lawyer who's been neatly fleeced out of $2 million by James Zimmer, a spineless law clerk, and Vangie Broussard, the Cajun exotic dancer Zimmer's caught on the rebound from Maxton? Dain's hunt for Zimmer and Vangie in New Orleans' darkest dives and bayous is a story—and what a story—in itself, but every time you get lulled into thinking that that story's winding down to a pursuit yarn, Gores pulls the rug out from under you with a professional snap. Together with Gores's sublimely comic, and utterly different, 32 Cadillacs (1992): a towering pair of back-to-back home runs.