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THE GLASS HIGHWAY by Loren D. Estleman

THE GLASS HIGHWAY

By

Pub Date: Aug. 26th, 1983
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin

Detroit's narrator-shamus Amos Walker (Motor City Blue, The Midnight Man) is hired by local TV-anchorman Sandy Broderick to find his missing son Bud: though Broderick has not seen young Bud in years (divorce, remarriage), he's afraid the kid is about to be arrested as a druggie--making Dad look bad. And Walker has no trouble locating the 20-year-old runaway, who is indeed living in seedy, druggy squalor with an enigmatic young woman named Paula Royce. End of case? So it seems. But then Bud is found murdered, Paula begs for Walker's help in fleeing to Canada (not entirely credibly, he obliges), and she's later reported dead. Meanwhile, Walker gets romantically involved with Bud's archly sluttish step-sister--and is being stalked by a lethal hit-man who demands to know Paula's real whereabouts. So Walker, who suffers imprisonment as well as physical abuse, is eager to figure out just what's going on: clearly it has something to do with a drug-traffic power struggle. . . and with Paula's dead-end past. As usual, a little too contrived, with that wearisome drug-angle yet again--but a couple of the twists are neat, Walker's wry-rough delivery is in good form, and this may be his best outing yet: varied, busily peopled, relatively fast.