Gas City

Starred review from November 5, 2007
Shamus-winner Estleman, best known for his hard-boiled Amos Walker series (American Detective
, etc.), creates a new, morally complex world in this razor-sharp tale of crime and corruption in a fictional eastern U.S. city. Gas City, once known as Garden Grove, has enjoyed stability as a result of understandings among the politicians, the police and the local gangsters. An enclave known as the Circle serves as the community's vice outlet, while the rest of the metropolis is virtually crime free. Police chief Francis Russell, after his wife's death, begins to question the devil's bargain he'd struck years earlier with mob boss Anthony Zeno. When Russell resumes acting like a lawman, virtually everyone in town feels the repercussions. Estleman masterfully creates a wide and diverse cast of characters, and sympathetically portrays their struggles to survive on the mean streets. A superfluous serial killer subplot doesn't detract from the author's achievement, which will justly be compared with that of James Ellroy's Los Angeles noir mysteries and John Gregory Dunne's True Confessions
. Admirers of unsparing crime fiction will hope that Estleman plans to visit Gas City again.

March 31, 2008
Shamus-winner Estleman momentarily sidetracks his long-running Amos Walker series in favor of a rich, smartly detailed study of a Midwestern city that is serene and law-abiding on the surface but corrupt at its core. Its population includes depressed and bent police chief Francis X. Russell; cynical, alcoholic Catholic bishop Hugh Dungannon; Tony Z, the mob chief who controls Gas City's 10-square-block sin pit, the Circle; and Palmer, a hard-luck hotel dick and pimp who may be the novel's sole honorable man. Russell attempts to clean up the Circle after the natural death of his beloved wife and a slew of hatchet murders by a serial killer nicknamed Beaver Cleaver. The author's vivid and dynamic prose is given a surprisingly bland reading by Mel Foster, whose slow, singsong delivery undercuts the book's tension. On the plus side, his voice is resonant, his dialects good; the bishop and other Irish-Americans have a nicely underdone brogue, the mobsters are properly gruff and tough. But the novel, arguably one of the best of the year, deserves a much better interpretation. Simultaneous release with the Forge hardcover (Reviews, Nov. 5, 2007).