Cutthroat Dogs: An Amos Walker Novel

In Edgar finalist Estleman’s outstanding 29th hard-boiled mystery featuring Detroit PI Amos Walker (after 2019’s When Old Midnight Comes Along), Walker chances into a cold case investigation after thwarting a would-be thief who pulled a gun on a bank teller. Chrys Corbeil, the grateful teller, hires him to help her brother, Dan Corbeil, who’s been incarcerated for decades for murder. April Goss, a college student, was found in her bloody bathtub with both wrists slashed. The initial conclusion of suicide was reversed when the police noted a suspicious absence of fingerprints in the apartment, and Goss’s boyfriend, Dan, who was supposedly motivated to kill her because of his discovery that she was pregnant, was charged and convicted. Evidence that Goss wasn’t pregnant was kept from the jury. Walker soon finds his reopening of the murder case opposed both by the victim’s powerful father, the host of a hit true crime TV series called Cutthroat Dogs, and by Dan himself. Estleman makes old-school, dogged, hit-the-pavement sleuthing plausible, while peppering the narrative with biting prose. This long-running series shows no sign of flagging. Agent: Dominick Abel, Dominick Abel Literary. (Sept.)