Margaret O'Mara is desperate to find her missing brother, Joe Colleran. She doesn't have a clue or a dime, and she hasn't seen her brother in thirty years. The last she heard, he was running a bar in Florida with an old war buddy, Michael Minogue. But when Minogue is discovered murdered on a Chicago pier, Margaret asks P.I. Paul Whelan to look in to it. As Whelan makes his rounds to the dilapidated apartment buildings and smoky bars of Chicago, he discovers that before his death, Minogue often talked of his old gang of close friends, which mysteriously broke apart after World War II. Their stories take Whelan through the abandon ruins of Riverview Park, once Chicago's famous amusement park and the site of a forty-year-old unsolved murder. Now, Whelan must sift through the past to find a killer who stalks the present, and Minogue's old friends who still carefully conceal a dark secret that binds them together.
1 of 1 copy available
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Creators
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Series
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Publisher
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Release date
November 18, 2005 -
Formats
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OverDrive Listen audiobook
- File size: 237099 KB
- Duration: 08:13:57
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Languages
- English
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Reviews
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June 30, 1997
Over the course of the four previous Paul Whelan novels, the low-rent shamus has conferred a dogged warmth on the mean streets of Chicago's blighted Uptown neighborhood. Still running on understated virtue and greasy food in his fifth appearance (after Killer on Argyle Street), Whelan searches for a long-missing man whose disappearance is somehow linked to a serviceman's murder in a amusement park 50 years ago. Ray Dudek was just back from the war when he was killed in a holdup at Riverview Park in 1946. His close friends, Joe Colleran and Mike Minogue, soon left Chicago to open a bar in Florida. Half a century later, Mike is found murdered by Lake Michigan, and the obit prompts Joe's sister to hire Whelan to search for her brother whom she's not heard from since 1959. Then Ray's discharge papers are found on another, unidentified corpse. Where the bold shamus walks so too goes Bauman, a tough cop in bad clothes who is sometimes with Whelan and sometimes against him. Replete with an engaging supporting cast, Raleigh's latest tale demonstrates his knack for fashioning living, breathing characters out of his tough urban settings. The mystery fiction that Sara Paretsky fashions from Chicago's South Side is fully matched in Raleigh's gritty North Side tales.
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