Deadman

Jon A. Jackson has been called “the best-kept secret of hard-boiled crime-fiction connoisseurs” by The New York Times and Deadman is another virtuoso performance that explains why.Fang Mulheisen, Detroit police detective extraordinaire, is back—this time on a mission to the high dusty plains of Montana, where Helen Sedlacek seems to have surfaced. Readers of Jackson’s previous work will remember that Helen, daughter of the late, hardly lamented Mafia Don Big Sid Sedlacek, exacted vengeance for her father’s murder by chopping down the leader of the Detroit mob with a double-barreled 12-gauge, then disappeared with a truck full of stolen cash. Now, months later, a man fitting the description of Joe Service—Helen’s lover and Mulheisen’s long-time underworld nemesis—arrives in a Butte hospital in a coma, having been shot in the face at close range. Then Mario Soper, a mob hit man with an open contract to kill Joe, turns up dead in a Montana irrigation ditch. Where is Helen? Who whacked Mario? Did Mario shoot Joe? Where is all the money?

These are the questions Mulheisen asks himself as he flies to Montana to investigate.