Infernal Angels by Loren D. Estleman

Amos Walker is an old-school PI, with all the baggage that comes with that. The first novel about him came out in 1980, and his creator Loren D. Estleman is still writing Walker novels; I think the most recent book is 2023's City Walls.

I read a lot of hard-boiled PI books in the '90s and somewhat into the Aughts; I started with the old guys but gradually shifted tastes (partially guided by Maryann Eckles, then the Editor-in-Chief of Mystery Guild and a great colleague, who got me to do some first-reading for her) towards women like Sue Grafton, Sara Paretsky, and Marcia Muller. And then I tapered off the mystery reading after I left fiction publishing and was no longer reading on an industrial level to begin with.

So there are things I think of as favorites even though I haven't touched them much in two decades; that's the peril of living. I read a big bunch of Walker novels back in 2007, right after leaving that editorial job, and have quietly accumulated most of the novels since then on a shelf without reading any of them between '08 and '24.

But the thing about life is that you can always do something today, even if you haven't done it for twenty years. So I read the 2010 Walker novel The Left-Handed Dollar about six weeks ago, and now I'm back again. No promises, but maybe I'll clean out that shelf, one book at a time, as I rotate through my to-be-read shelves.

Infernal Angels was the 2011 Walker novel; it's a bit more thriller-y than I prefer in my mysteries - I was grumping about this twenty years ago here about Lawrence Block novels, so it's not a new complaint; at least I am consistent.

Walker is a middle-aged man and deeply old-fashioned: by the point of this book he's using a cell phone (dragged kicking and screaming, mostly) but resolutely refuses to understand computers or anything else modern. He's a Vietnam vet whose age hasn't quite advanced as quickly as the thirty years since his first novel, but it's starting to tick up noticeably; he's not quite fifty but it's not far away.

And this novel kicks off when a police contact connects him with a vintage-merchandise dealer - that merchandise seems to be largely big-ticket items; furniture and TVs and large-scale home décor - who just had a burglary. Crossgrain, the dealer, had a shipment of TV converter boxes stolen, and asks Walker to try to track them down.

Walker promises three days from his retainer, and goes off to talk to his contacts. He gets the names of three potential fences for material like this. One is a white rapper (Bud Light) who mostly runs a music store now while he works through a murder charge in Guam from the death of his ex-manager. (Bud claims to be completely innocent; Walker believes him.) The other two are, first, another, more traditional scavenger/fence called Johnny Toledo and, second, Eugenia Pappas, the widow of the scion of a long line of fences and stolen-goods receivers - she claims to have gone aboveboard, but Walker and his contacts never believe anyone goes straight in Detroit.

Things get complicated from there - Crossgrain is murdered the very next night, by someone apparently looking for the last converter box, which he unwisely showed on a TV news story about the break-in. There's another death soon afterward, probably killed by the same person. And the converter boxes turn out to be part of a smuggling operation, with ultra-high-grade heroine hidden inside them.

So Walker is pulled into a cross-agency investigation, with Mary Ann Thaler from the feds and John Alderdyce from the locals. Both were in the previous novel; both are management-level but not tippy-top brass; both are old friends who somewhat bend the rules for him, mostly, I think, because it's that kind of PI novel.

There's a villain behind it - who was in a previous Walker book, though I didn't remember her - and the vaguely racist dragon-lady stuff in the previous book gets a workout here, with her frankly silly (and almost James Bond-ian) rationale for her criminal enterprise. Of course, truth and justice win out in the end, but Walker doesn't have to do a whole lot of serious detecting here: contacting Crossgrain and the three fences set everything in motion, and he just has to survive what happens afterward.

As I said, I tend to like mysteries better than thrillers, and particularly mysteries where cops act like real cops and don't just let a random civilian run around causing trouble because his name's on the book cover. This is much more like the latter; I enjoyed it, and Walker's voice is still a fine classic-PI mixture of grumpy and world-weary, but I might not make it through all of the remaining Walker books if they keep being full of eeevil Chinese masterminds and cops who always bail Walker out.