Man with an Axe
-
- $8.99
-
- $8.99
Publisher Description
“The toughest, most darkly comic, consistently superior American procedural on the market” takes on the greatest mystery of all: the death of Jimmy Hoffa (Booklist).
When an eager young historian asks Detroit police detective “Fang” Mulheisen for the real story of Grootka—his legendary law-enforcement mentor—the question leads him to uncover his late friend’s notebooks. And with them, Mulheisen may also have stumbled upon the answer to one of the biggest unanswered questions in American history . . .
What happened to Jimmy Hoffa?
The notebooks tell an incredible story in which the supposedly late labor leader was, in fact, about to meet his end when he was rescued by a gifted musician and spirited into hiding in the wilderness of northern Michigan. More than that, the past Grootka describes may be related to a deadly mystery in present-day Detroit.
With this action-packed novel spanning decades of cops and criminals, “Jackson remains a master of irreverent, hard-boiled comedy” (Publishers Weekly).
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Two dead legends--real-life Teamsters boss Jimmy Hoffa and Jackson's fictional Grootka, the take-no-prisoners mentor of Detroit homicide detective Sgt. Fang Mulheisen--grab center stage in the seventh book in Jackson's lively, quirky series (after Dead Folks, 1996). The sound of jazz music (the titular "axe" is in fact a saxophone) also permeates the story: Grootka was a devoted fan, and Mulheisen so thoroughly shares his passion that he describes an attractive researcher who has a grant to dig into Grootka's past as looking like "the great Detroit jazz pianist Geri Allen. The same bright look, the vitality and obvious intelligence." The book begins on the day of Hoffa's disappearance--July 30, 1975--as gifted tenor saxophonist Tyrone Addison reluctantly rescues the labor leader from gangster assassins and hides him at his uncle's house on Turtle Lake, a resort favored by blacks in upstate Michigan. Twenty years later, long after both Hoffa and Addison have disappeared, Mulheisen finds a series of notebooks left by Grootka and reopens his late friend's investigation. The constant switching between the present, narrated by Mulheisen, and the past, told in the third person, gives the narrative a two-step jerkiness. But Mulheisen is, as always, a smart and mordant observer of his hometown's eccentricities, and Jackson remains a master of irreverent, hard-boiled comedy.
