Description:
Crime fiction readers who insist that the good guys win and the bad guys lose, and that you ought to at least be able to tell the two apart, should steer a wide course around Steve Monroe's '46, Chicago. Moral compromise and relativism are the very foundations of this somber yet compulsively driving yarn about power and greed and the corruption they engender. Gus Carson used to be as mendacious and brutal a cop as the Windy City could produce. But after barely surviving a World War II Japanese submarine attack in the Pacific, he's turned positively respectable. "No fights, no bribes, no extortion," his superior recalls, approvingly, "not even a restaurant owner complaining that you demanded free doughnuts and coffee." Then one night, Carson shoots a black man who's just killed a white lawyer in a brothel, and he's suspended from the force--just in time to go to work for a Republican mayoral hopeful, who promises him reinstatement and $500 if he can find a kidnapped black racketeer named Ed Jones. Sounds straightforward enough, except that Carson suspects the attorney's death and the Jones case are connected. To whose benefit, though? And how do these crimes relate to an underworld struggle for control of Chicago gambling? As he did in his first novel, '57, Chicago, Monroe brings distinction to a fairly conventional noir plot. His juxtaposition of caviar-class white and worker-class black cultures adds depth to this occasionally violent drama, his exposure of Carson's conscience is patiently and convincingly done, and some of the dialogue here is sharp enough to cut lips. '46 Chicago treads where more practiced detective novelists, such as Max Allan Collins, have already been, but still leaves tracks worth following. --J. Kingston Pierce
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