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cchartier's review
4.0
My first Amos Walker mystery (alas, my library does not have all of them), and it was great! I'm always on the lookout for good detective series that I haven't read before, and there are dozens of entries in this one. I wasn't familiar with Estleman before and feel foolish for it; he's been in many major anthologies over the last few decades. This book w easy to read across a lazy Saturday afternoon on my patio and perfectly hard-boiled. The language is wonderful, fully in the tradition of 50s detective novels, and the plot moves at a clip.
Example: "He moved his right hand clumsily and showed me the round blue empty eye of death. He'd been holding it behind the door and I've been too busy wondering what champagne to buy out of his father's thousand dollars to notice. The gun shook a little. I hate it when they do that."
I do have a complaint, one that I hope clears up as the series advances into the 200s (there are fairly recent installments), is about race. This book is set in Detroit in the late 1970s. The cops show casual racism (it's still remarkable that there is one black detective on the police force of a large Detroit suburb), and I buy that. But the author falls into an annoying white trap that the major characters of color (Paula, who is Columbian, and Detective Bloodworth, who is African-American) are "special." Paula is unintentionally seductive (this is a major plot point) who men fall over when she gives her "real" smile. Similarly, Bloodworth has a "real" laugh and smile that make him trustworthy, and convinces Walker he's a decent cop. It reads as if the author is intentionally making his two important characters of color extraordinary in some way. They can't just exist. The writing is good enough that I'm happy to give the series another try, and I hope to see the author mature as I get caught up on over 30 years of his writing.
Example: "He moved his right hand clumsily and showed me the round blue empty eye of death. He'd been holding it behind the door and I've been too busy wondering what champagne to buy out of his father's thousand dollars to notice. The gun shook a little. I hate it when they do that."
I do have a complaint, one that I hope clears up as the series advances into the 200s (there are fairly recent installments), is about race. This book is set in Detroit in the late 1970s. The cops show casual racism (it's still remarkable that there is one black detective on the police force of a large Detroit suburb), and I buy that. But the author falls into an annoying white trap that the major characters of color (Paula, who is Columbian, and Detective Bloodworth, who is African-American) are "special." Paula is unintentionally seductive (this is a major plot point) who men fall over when she gives her "real" smile. Similarly, Bloodworth has a "real" laugh and smile that make him trustworthy, and convinces Walker he's a decent cop. It reads as if the author is intentionally making his two important characters of color extraordinary in some way. They can't just exist. The writing is good enough that I'm happy to give the series another try, and I hope to see the author mature as I get caught up on over 30 years of his writing.
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