Gas City by Loren Estleman

Published by Forge Books in 2007, Loren D. Estleman's novel, Gas City, is a stand-alone. The jacket flap says, "Beneath the surface of a blue-collar Midwestern city roil dark undercurrents of lust, power, revenge, and madness... exposes the black heart of the Gas City..."


Estleman has a gift for dialog and for capturing nuances in relationships. I nearly always like his beginning lines & Gas City begins with, "A couple of days before Arch Killian's seventy-eight birthday, he mentioned to his son that he'd outlived all his old friends and no one was left to serve as his pallbearer." Turns old Arch Killian was a surveyor, which of course, is a time-honored profession in Michigan. In fact, we have a Museum of Surveying in Lansing. Should be interesting to see if surveying becomes a dominant element in this book.

Looking at page 123, "Work was another thing. She suspected she owed her gold shield to the two years and three months she'd spent married to Billy Boyle, and the bureaucratic inconvenience involved in resuming her maiden name after the divorce; she'd just decided to keep it. When Rice-Hippert was in office, Chief Russell ahd responded to the mayor's push to promote female members of the department to positions of responsibility by pulling a half a dozen personnel files and greenlighting the Dugans and Callahans."

And that's as far as I've gotten. Will finish this later, as I'm only on page 25.