June 30, 1997
Over the course of the four previous Paul Whelan novels, the low-rent shamus has conferred a dogged warmth on the mean streets of Chicago's blighted Uptown neighborhood. Still running on understated virtue and greasy food in his fifth appearance (after Killer on Argyle Street), Whelan searches for a long-missing man whose disappearance is somehow linked to a serviceman's murder in a amusement park 50 years ago. Ray Dudek was just back from the war when he was killed in a holdup at Riverview Park in 1946. His close friends, Joe Colleran and Mike Minogue, soon left Chicago to open a bar in Florida. Half a century later, Mike is found murdered by Lake Michigan, and the obit prompts Joe's sister to hire Whelan to search for her brother whom she's not heard from since 1959. Then Ray's discharge papers are found on another, unidentified corpse. Where the bold shamus walks so too goes Bauman, a tough cop in bad clothes who is sometimes with Whelan and sometimes against him. Replete with an engaging supporting cast, Raleigh's latest tale demonstrates his knack for fashioning living, breathing characters out of his tough urban settings. The mystery fiction that Sara Paretsky fashions from Chicago's South Side is fully matched in Raleigh's gritty North Side tales.