Gas City

By Loren D. Estleman

Book Overview

Calling upon his considerable novelistic skills, Loren D. Estleman exposes the black heart of a seemingly stable, well-run city suddenly pitched into violence and chaos. A delicate balance of forces--greed and corruption, ambition and desire--run out of control in the wake of a serial killer's grisly rampage.

A power struggle--between a police chief who has looked the other way for too long, a Mafia boss who holds the city's vices in his powerful grasp, and media reporters looking for a big story--turns what has been a minor dispute into a desperate struggle for survival.

Setting this drama, Gas City, in a blue-collar metropolis dominated by an oil company, Estleman, with an unerring eye for telling detail and an ear for dialogue that reveals the secret desires of his characters, crafts a fascinating, deadly tapestry of love, ambition, revenge, and redemption, a stunning portrait of the human condition.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0765319594
• ISBN13: 9780765319593
• Release Date: March 2009
• Publisher: St. Martins Press-3PL
• Length: 304 Pages
• Weight: 0.10 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 5.5" x 8.5"

Customer Reviews

lil wayne

yo dogs this book is one chizle on the shizel. i love thi book because its of th chain doggy. thosse people are like yo dogs we lost

Redemption

Unneedful of haste, Loren Estleman, in this standalone novel, limns a tale of an `ordinary' Midwestern blue-collar city with its usual equal parts of good guys and bad, corruption and greed, which with one precipitating event begins to boil to a point where it may just combust. Pivotal characters include Police Chief Francis Russell, married for 55 years to his beloved Martha ("Marty"), and devastated by her death as the book opens; Anthony Zeno ("Tony Z"], boss of The Circle, an area of ten square blocks ["the only thing the area required to be considered an independent city was its telephone exchange"] to which all the sex-for-sale, drugs, gambling, etc. of the city are confined; Nicholas Bianco ("Mr. White"), Tony's boss; Moe Shiel, the unofficial and unsworn Chief of Police of the Circle, as well as its unelected Mayor; and Hugh Dungannon, Russell's boyhood friend now a Bishop in the church; and assorted others. The town was built around an oil company which is and always has been its most important component and employer. Russell's life is now immeasurably saddened. He hasn't seen his daughter in 12 years; his son was killed while serving in the Armed Forces in southeast Asia. He has served as Chief for five terms, during all of which time he has had an "understanding" the local Mafia boss With his wife's death, the latter is unsure whether Russell will "continue to hold up his end." Indeed, he ponders whether redemption is possible, and considers actually doing the job he was hired to do all those years ago. In addition to those described above, the book is full of colorful characters: The hotel detective who says of himself: "Being a busted copy was as bad as being a defrocked priest. It took practice to keep your lies straight;" Zeno's wife, Deanne, whose husband describes her as "healthy as a horse. And just as expensive to keep;" a local judge who "had developed the bad habit, after seventy, of slipping in and out of gear when he was running for reelection. In his dotage he thought his seat on the bench had something to do with ballots." In the midst of a mayoral campaign, the town is hit with a serial killer, variously referred to as the Black Bag killer [for his choice of container for body parts] or Beaver Cleaver [for his choice of weapon]. I found I had to pay close attention when reading for fear of missing subtlely wonderful passages, which abound. One of my favorites was this description of Russell's reactions upon his wife's passing: "And then the rage and heat were gone, and there was a hole through him and he had to turn so the wind wouldn't whistle through it. He'd been preparing for this moment for weeks - years, he corrected, from the time the results of the first tests had come back and he'd stopped arguing with them - and he'd hoped the dread of the waiting would give way to a sense of release. He'd felt it for a moment, with the last exhalation, when she took her leave of her body, a lacy apparition i

Top-shelf noir

Loren D. Estleman is an author whose time has surely come. Gas City is a superb piece of work, masterfully paced and utterly engrossing. The sharp characterization, canny ear for dialogue, and uniquely vivid description of setting makes this a hard book to put down. I will definitely be keeping an eye out for future releases by this talented novelist.

Have You Discovered Loren Estleman Yet?

Loren Estleman's new novel, "Gas City," is another solid work by a man whose strong sense of geographic place, compelling narratives, and sharply drawn characters have brought alive stories from Tombstone to Motown. In "Gas City," Estleman has created a corrupt Midwestern city, peopling it with gangsters, cops, newspapermen, drunks, dancers, bartenders, and millionaires, none of them stereotypes, all of them richly alive with their own histories establishing the back story of the city itself. While Estleman has become widely know for his Amos Walker series of hard-boiled detective novels (set in Detroit), "Gas City" seems more closely related to two of his westerns: "Billy Gashade" and "Bloody Season." Both titles routinely make appearances on any list where westerns are being discussed as serious fiction, and it is their precise historical detail and the battered, almost shabby quality of their protagonists that is most evident in "Gas City." The story in "Gas City" takes a number of sharp turns during its telling--that of a corrupt police chief, Francis X. Russell, who, after a lifelong career of cooperation with the mobster who runs the town, Anthony Zeno, decides to do an about face with his life following the death of his wife. Suspense builds over whether or not Russell, who, as a Catholic wouldn't contemplate taking his own life, is trying to goad the mob into killing him. Adding to the novel's elements is a mysterious hit man, an alcoholic ex-cop turned hotel detective and pimp trying to straighten out his own life, and a gruesome serial killer. Estleman, who once parodied the detective genre in his hilarious "Peeper," also uses dialogue which is as good as anything by Raymond Chandler or Elmore Leonard for sarcasm and ironic humor. For any reader who enjoys well-written, richly detailed, and highly readable suspense novels, Loren Estleman is a true find. "Gas City" is a great place to start. The good news is that, once you're hooked, you'll discover that Estleman has written a shelf of other compelling reads.