Maxwell Street Blues by Marc Krulewitch, published August 5, 2014; Alibi
Genre: crime fiction
Book description:
Who: Jules Landau, a college man turned private eye on the Windy City of Chicago's mean streets.
Chicago runs in Jules Landau’s veins. So does the blood of crooks. Now Jules is going legit as a private eye, stalking bail jumpers and cheating spouses—until he gets his first big case. Unfortunately, the client is his ex-con father, and the job is finding the killer of a man whom Jules loved like family.
What: Why did someone put two bullets in the head of gentle bookkeeper Charles Snook? Jules is determined to find out, even if the search takes him to perilous places he never wanted to go. Snooky, as he was affectionately known, had a knack for turning dirty dollars clean, with clients ranging from humble shop owners to sharp-dressed mobsters.
How: As Jules retraces Snooky’s last days, he crosses paths with a way-too-eager detective, a gorgeous and perplexing tattoo artist, a silver-haired university administrator with a kinky side, and a crusading journalist. Exposing one dirty secret after another, the PI is on a dangerous learning curve. And, at the top of that curve, a killer readies to strike again.
My comments:
This is a hard-boiled detective/PI novel of the old school style. A new PI Jules tries to find out who killed his father's old friend Snooky, the bookkeeper for the mob, so to speak, and hides Snooky's sought after notebook while he investigates. The notebook would reveal names and corruption in all the usual places - in politics, on the streets, in the police force, and even among the university elite whose reputations should have been clean.
If you like hardboiled crime fiction and the mean streets of Chicago, this is a book to pick up. Not extraordinary in any sense, the author does however seems to be following in the footsteps of the classic writers of the genre and is a writer to keep an eye on.
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About the author: Marc Krulewitch’s Jules Landau mysteries take place in Chicago, where he was born and where his family has lived for generations. He now resides in Colorado.
