King of the Corner
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- $6.99
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- $6.99
Publisher Description
Fresh out of jail, an ex-ballplayer stumbles into the world of bounty hunting and murder in urban Detroit
Even prison couldn’t stop former big-league pitcher Doc Miller from playing baseball. Jailed after a teenage girl overdosed on cocaine at one of his house parties, the former Detroit Tigers ace became a star at the Michigan State Prison, bringing home the institution’s first Midwestern Penal System championship. Now out on parole, his days of ballpark heroics are over for good. Miller’s brother gets him a job selling tractor parts for John Deere, work Doc finds even duller than life in the joint. While moonlighting as a cab driver, he meets a bail bondsman who offers work as a bounty hunter. On their first job together, they find their target savagely murdered. His name was Ambrose X. Dryce, formerly Wilson McCoy, a Black Panther turned drug lord. Sucked back into the criminal underworld, Doc will need to make his best plays to stay alive without violating his parole. This ebook features an illustrated biography of Loren D. Estleman including rare photos from the author’s personal collection.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
This final volume in Estleman's Detroit trilogy (after Whiskey River and Motown ) is a superb thriller that may cause an uproar in America's sixth-largest city. Doc Miller, once an ace reliever for the Tigers, is sprung after seven years in prison, a sentence he earned when a guest at a party he threw OD'ed on cocaine. Fat, flamboyant bail bondsman Maynard Ance offers six-foot-five Doc a job as escort while Ance goes after a skipped client, Wilson McCoy (last seen in Motown). McCoy, former Black Panther and leader of the Marshals of Mahomet--``revolutionaries'' who raise money by selling drugs--eventually turns up a suicide. Accepting Ance's offer of full-time employment, Doc is plunged into an intricate series of events in a fast-moving narrative that veers from a black funeral to a fancy fund-raiser, with danger at every turn. The pleasure of the intricate plot is enhanced by the cast of vivid ? colorful an awk adj to use in describing a multiracial castgood point! characters, led by Ance, who likens a pesky reporter to ``a prostate the size of Ohio.'' Other players include a genteel black former madam who knows where all the bodies are buried, Mahomet's elegant widow, and some ballplaying Marshals who run dope. Real-life Mayor Coleman Young is depicted in the last chapter as the owner of a crack house. As in the earlier Detroit books, the climax here is violent, the denouement cynical. Estleman, who also writes the Amos Walker mysteries, knows and somehow still loves Detroit, not unlike its other bard, Elmore Leonard.
