Cutthroat dogs An Amos Walker mystery

Detroit private investigator Amos Walker seems to keep stumbling onto interesting cases. Here, in the twenty-ninth novel in the series, Walker foils a bank robbery-- because, you know, he's that kind of guy--and gets pulled into a twenty-year-old cold case. A bank teller's brother has spent most of his life behind bars for a murder he didn't commit; Amos sets about finding the real killer. But he doesn't count on opposition from the victim's father, a celebrity TV host, or from the wrongly incarcerated man himself. Reading a new Amos Walker novel is an act of pure joy: the writing is perfect, the story impeccably plotted, the resolution satisfying. Series fans will be clamoring for this new book, but it works just fine as a standalone, too, which means new readers can jump right in. Another first-rate entry in a series that has maintained a high level of quality since the very beginning.

In Edgar finalist Estleman's outstanding 29th hard-boiled mystery featuring Detroit PI Amos Walker (after 2019's When Old Midnight Comes Along), Walker chances into a cold case investigation after thwarting a would-be thief who pulled a gun on a bank teller. Chrys Corbeil, the grateful teller, hires him to help her brother, Dan Corbeil, who's been incarcerated for decades for murder. April Goss, a college student, was found in her bloody bathtub with both wrists slashed. The initial conclusion of suicide was reversed when the police noted a suspicious absence of fingerprints in the apartment, and Goss's boyfriend, Dan, who was supposedly motivated to kill her because of his discovery that she was pregnant, was charged and convicted. Evidence that Goss wasn't pregnant was kept from the jury. Walker soon finds his reopening of the murder case opposed both by the victim's powerful father, the host of a hit true crime TV series called Cutthroat Dogs, and by Dan himself. Estleman makes old-school, dogged, hit-the-pavement sleuthing plausible, while peppering the narrative with biting prose. This long-running series shows no sign of flagging. Agent: Dominick Abel, Dominick Abel Literary. (Sept.)