Little Altar Boy
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- £3.99
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- £3.99
Publisher Description
On a snowy Thursday night in Chicago, there is a knock on Detective Hank Purcell’s door. Sister Mary Philomena has seen something terrible at Saint Fidelis Church — a violation of all she holds sacred. The next Monday, she is found murdered in the convent basement, next to a furnace stuffed with old papers and photographs. And Margaret, Hank’s teenage daughter, has disappeared. Hank and his unconventional partner Marvin Bondarowicz try to force their way through a wall of ecclesiastical silence to find the killer, while their search for Margaret takes them from swank lakeside flats to drug dens to south-side basement blues clubs…and the snow keeps falling.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Set in 1967, Guzlowski's downbeat sequel to 2018's Suitcase Charlie finds hard-bitten, morally upright Chicago police detective Hank Purcell looking into some grim crimes. At the urging of Sister Mary Philomena, Hank and his quirky, iconoclastic partner, Marvin Bondarowicz, both WWII vets with memories of terrible things that men can do, confront a pedophile priest at her church, but the man denies the allegations. Days later, Sister Mary is found dead in the church basement, stabbed three dozen times. The church stonewalls the investigation. Meanwhile, Hank's 19-year-old daughter, Margaret, goes missing. His inquiries make it clear she's fallen in with a bad, druggy crowd. When an 11-year-old altar boy is discovered hanged in a closet, the bleakness of the world really hits Hank and Marvin, who resort to their fists and the bottle while failing to get much traction with either of the murder cases. The resolution of the crimes including Margaret's disappearance brings little satisfaction to either the dogged detectives or the reader. This is strictly for those who prefer the darkest of hard-boiled fiction.
