Killer on Argyle Street
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
A Chicago PI hunts for a missing kid who fell in with the wrong crowd: "Raleigh presents a genuine good guy in the luckless Whelan" (Publishers Weekly).
An elderly woman has asked private investigator Paul Whelan to look into the disappearance of Tony Blanchard—a young man she'd taken in after his parents died. Instead, Whelan discovers a string of murders, all tied to a car-theft ring.
All the evidence suggests that Tony is dead as well, but Whelan keeps digging until he finds himself surrounded by a dangerous maze of silent witnesses, crooked cops, and people willing to kill to keep the truth from surfacing. When a friend from Whelan's past emerges—a friend Whelan thought long dead—his investigation takes a dangerous turn: one that brings him no closer to Tony, and a lot closer to his own demise.
"Raleigh's Paul Whelan series brings to mind the late Ross McDonald's Lew Archer novels . . . Read Whelan now; he won't be a secret much longer." —Booklist
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
After three stellar books (most recently, The Maxwell Street Blues), the grungy charms of shamus Paul Whelan and his domain, the equally unslick Uptown region of Chicago, are dulled by dragged-out pacing in this fourth effort. A prologue describes a murder near the lake, committed by a sinister man with a talent for disguise. The action then cuts to Whelan taking on the case of a missing teenage boy in the Vietnamese section of the city. It turns out that the missing kid was employed by the man killed in the prologue, as were several other criminal types, all also dead. As the hunt for the boy quickly segues into a hunt for the killer, Raleigh details Whelan's diet of dirt-cheap food, booze and coffee, his bad luck with babes and his dealings with pals and clients-who tend to come from the lower social strata. But the narrative wheels spin too long in nameless bars and diners before finding traction in the relationship between the current case and some figures from Whelan's past. Although not up to the high standard of previous titles, the vividness of Raleigh's Chicago and Chicagoans still raises this entry above average.
