Chicago Confidential: A Nathan Heller Novel
Nobody does historical hard-boiled detective fiction better than Max  Allan Collins. He proves this once again inChicago Confidential, a  randy, rollicking read that finds series PI Nathan Heller squeezed dangerously  between ambitious politicians and remorseless gangsters. The year is 1950, and  America's first congressional inquiry into organized crime, led by  presidential-hopeful U.S. Senator Estes Kefauver, has swept into the Windy City  on a tsunami of press coverage. Heller hopes to lie low until this  subpoena-waving circus has passed. "While not a mob guy myself," he confides, "I  had... certain underworld associations, and hence did know where a good share of  the bodies were buried. Hell, I'd buried some of them." But, instead, he's  catapulted into the investigative limelight, first by one of his  employees--ex-cop Bill Drury, who agrees to cooperate with Kefauver's  crusade--and then by his association with Jackie Payne, the abused,  drug-addicted girlfriend of a powerful mobster. After hit men target Drury, and  Jackie is abducted, Heller finds a way to get revenge and justice at the same  time.As in previous Heller outings,Chicago Confidentialsmoothly blends  well-researched fact with fiction. The gumshoe pals around with crooner Frank  Sinatra, falls (fast) to the seductive wiles of future starlet Jayne Mansfield,  and is threatened by commie-hunting Senator Joseph McCarthy. IfConfidentialis less darkly intense thanStolen AwayorAngel in Black, two previous  entries in this series, its quicksilver dialogue and truly menacing action  sequences still make it one gangbuster of a book.--J. Kingston Pierce