The latest Will Anderson mystery!
--Publishers Weekly (STARRED REVIEW!)
"Johnson does for early 20th-century Detroit what James Ellroy did for 1950s Los Angeles, creating a noxious brew of violence and corruption in his fourth novel featuring auto mechanic Will Anderson (after 2012’s Detroit Breakdown).
"In 1912, as the women’s suffrage movement picks up steam, British suffragist Sylvia Pankhurst arrives in the city in advance of a pivotal vote on an amendment to grant Michigan women the vote. Anderson, nominally an employee of his father’s electric car business, finds himself again in the midst of murder and mayhem when he stops a gunman from shooting the love of his life, Elizabeth Hume, one of Detroit’s suffragette leaders.
"With his history of blackouts and illness, he has a hard time getting anyone to take his fears seriously, even as an assassination attempt on Teddy Roosevelt, the Progressive Party candidate for president, increases the tension around the campaign. Powerful forces are aligned against the amendment: in particular the Michigan Liquor Association, which fears that granting women the vote is but a prologue to prohibition.
"The complex plot works, and the detection and action scenes combine for a thrilling read—the series’ best so far. "
--Kirkus Reviews (STARRED REVIEW!)
"A return to the morass of corruption and political turmoil that was 1912 Detroit suggests that it wasn’t all that different from today. Will Anderson is still suffering from the radium treatments forced on him when he went undercover at the Eloise Mental Hospital (Detroit Breakdown, 2012) to help the family of his lover, Elizabeth Hume. Elizabeth, who’s deeply involved in the women’s suffrage movement, is battling to get the 19th Amendment passed in Michigan, where it’s fiercely opposed by the Michigan Liquor Association. The MLA is run by the duplicitous Andrew Murphy, whose vicious gang of toughs will do anything, including commit murder, to prevent the amendment’s passage.
When Will prevents a mysterious figure from shooting Elizabeth at a rally, she and Detective Riordan both think he’s hallucinating. Their reaction only makes Will more determined to protect his love. Tipped off to one of Murphy’s schemes by a prostitute who works as a secretary for Murphy, Will steals a truck from his father’s electric car factory and enlists the help of Elizabeth’s mentally unstable brother and his equally dicey friend to sneak into Eloise and steal a recording machine, which they hide in the MLA offices by posing as exterminators.
Stung by Elizabeth’s pity for his mental state and still uncertain whether he can trust the head of Elizabeth’s security team or even Riordan, Will resorts to a drinking spree and loses several days of his life. Despite all the obstacles ranged against him, he refuses to give up his quest to protect Elizabeth.
Will’s fourth is his best outing yet, packed with action by turns funny and chilling and deftly blended with the historical background."
--Book Browse
"Detroit Shuffle is the very best kind of amateur detective novel - a complex weave of disparate but interrelated threads that advance then double back on each other in ways that would make a Flemish tapestry artist envious. Mostly-failed engineer Will Anderson has thwarted the murder of suffragist Elizabeth Hume, and is desperately searching for the man who attempted to kill her. On top of that lies the emotional drama of Will's mental disability.
He has blackouts, the result of clinical radium treatments he endured during a previous case. This bit of background information, alone, enticed me to read D. E. Johnson's previous novels, although Detroit Shuffle can certainly be read on its own.
It's the fall of 1912 in a city Will refers to as "the Paris of the West": Detroit, Michigan - and with good reason. In 1912 Detroit was the epicenter of something that would truly open great, new vistas for the entire population of the Western Hemisphere - the automobile industry. Elizabeth, who is Will's girlfriend and leader of a large and influential suffragist group, is speaking before a crowd when Will spots a man staring at Elizabeth and brandishing a gun. In a blur of panic, Will draws his weapon and attempts to overtake the mysterious gunman, who narrowly escapes Will's grasp before disappearing into the melee. With no corroborating witnesses, Will is taken into custody as a suspected assassin. Of his own girlfriend!
No one takes the notion of Will's attempt to kill Elizabeth seriously. But more damning is the fact that everyone, Elizabeth included, believes the alleged gunman is a figment of Will's imagination; a residual affect of his previous hospitalization. Their doubt only serves to fortify the young man's resolve. He becomes so determined to prove the gunman's existence that he gets himself fired from his job as an engineer at his father's electric car company for missing too many days' work. In the meantime, Will becomes a target. Shady characters are following him, pursuing every shred of evidence he collects, threatening his life.
Here is where Johnson stirs the pot, or plot, as it were. Will's evidence begins to coalesce into a suspected conspiracy to fix the upcoming election that will determine the immediate fate of women's suffrage in Michigan. Johnson brings in one potential suspect after another as if each is just waiting in the wings for his or her cue. There is the head of the Michigan Liquor Association, an old high school classmate, private detective agents hired to protect Elizabeth, a former nemesis, plus the corrupt Detroit Police Department. Will barely knows which way to turn. Even his "allies", Detective Riordan and Elizabeth, remain doubtful of his reports, and their well-intentioned actions often only serve to thwart Will's efforts.
All of this is exquisitely laid out amid sumptuous descriptions of a time and a city so alive and vital as to leap off the page and embrace the reader in its grand exuberance. My only, albeit infinitesimal, complaint is that sometimes Johnson's story arc and wickedly sharp characterizations fall second place under the weight of these meticulously researched descriptions. But as I think about it, that may just be Johnson's secret to plot pacing. Because he is indeed a master at establishing a finely tuned tempo, holding a reader just breathless
enough to keep turning page after page.
Yessir. With all its mystery, thrills, moral, ethical and emotional dilemmas - even Will has self-doubts after suffering a day-and-a-half long blackout - to say nothing of Johnson's literary chiaroscuro, this is about as good as it gets. I say, if you read only only one amateur detective novel this year, make it this one.
-- About Books by Claire Ernsberger, PhD
Detroit Shuffle by D. E. Johnson (St. Martin’s Minotaur). Another historical mystery, but not at all exotic: Detroit just as it was becoming a great city—the 1920s. The third novel in what’s becoming a must-read private-eye series, clever, richly atmospheric, gritty and dark and cynical—think Philip Marlowe in Michigan but with colder weather and tighter plots.
"Johnson does for early 20th-century Detroit what James Ellroy did for 1950s Los Angeles, creating a noxious brew of violence and corruption in his fourth novel featuring auto mechanic Will Anderson (after 2012’s Detroit Breakdown).
"In 1912, as the women’s suffrage movement picks up steam, British suffragist Sylvia Pankhurst arrives in the city in advance of a pivotal vote on an amendment to grant Michigan women the vote. Anderson, nominally an employee of his father’s electric car business, finds himself again in the midst of murder and mayhem when he stops a gunman from shooting the love of his life, Elizabeth Hume, one of Detroit’s suffragette leaders.
"With his history of blackouts and illness, he has a hard time getting anyone to take his fears seriously, even as an assassination attempt on Teddy Roosevelt, the Progressive Party candidate for president, increases the tension around the campaign. Powerful forces are aligned against the amendment: in particular the Michigan Liquor Association, which fears that granting women the vote is but a prologue to prohibition.
"The complex plot works, and the detection and action scenes combine for a thrilling read—the series’ best so far. "
--Kirkus Reviews (STARRED REVIEW!)
"A return to the morass of corruption and political turmoil that was 1912 Detroit suggests that it wasn’t all that different from today. Will Anderson is still suffering from the radium treatments forced on him when he went undercover at the Eloise Mental Hospital (Detroit Breakdown, 2012) to help the family of his lover, Elizabeth Hume. Elizabeth, who’s deeply involved in the women’s suffrage movement, is battling to get the 19th Amendment passed in Michigan, where it’s fiercely opposed by the Michigan Liquor Association. The MLA is run by the duplicitous Andrew Murphy, whose vicious gang of toughs will do anything, including commit murder, to prevent the amendment’s passage.
When Will prevents a mysterious figure from shooting Elizabeth at a rally, she and Detective Riordan both think he’s hallucinating. Their reaction only makes Will more determined to protect his love. Tipped off to one of Murphy’s schemes by a prostitute who works as a secretary for Murphy, Will steals a truck from his father’s electric car factory and enlists the help of Elizabeth’s mentally unstable brother and his equally dicey friend to sneak into Eloise and steal a recording machine, which they hide in the MLA offices by posing as exterminators.
Stung by Elizabeth’s pity for his mental state and still uncertain whether he can trust the head of Elizabeth’s security team or even Riordan, Will resorts to a drinking spree and loses several days of his life. Despite all the obstacles ranged against him, he refuses to give up his quest to protect Elizabeth.
Will’s fourth is his best outing yet, packed with action by turns funny and chilling and deftly blended with the historical background."
--Book Browse
"Detroit Shuffle is the very best kind of amateur detective novel - a complex weave of disparate but interrelated threads that advance then double back on each other in ways that would make a Flemish tapestry artist envious. Mostly-failed engineer Will Anderson has thwarted the murder of suffragist Elizabeth Hume, and is desperately searching for the man who attempted to kill her. On top of that lies the emotional drama of Will's mental disability.
He has blackouts, the result of clinical radium treatments he endured during a previous case. This bit of background information, alone, enticed me to read D. E. Johnson's previous novels, although Detroit Shuffle can certainly be read on its own.
It's the fall of 1912 in a city Will refers to as "the Paris of the West": Detroit, Michigan - and with good reason. In 1912 Detroit was the epicenter of something that would truly open great, new vistas for the entire population of the Western Hemisphere - the automobile industry. Elizabeth, who is Will's girlfriend and leader of a large and influential suffragist group, is speaking before a crowd when Will spots a man staring at Elizabeth and brandishing a gun. In a blur of panic, Will draws his weapon and attempts to overtake the mysterious gunman, who narrowly escapes Will's grasp before disappearing into the melee. With no corroborating witnesses, Will is taken into custody as a suspected assassin. Of his own girlfriend!
No one takes the notion of Will's attempt to kill Elizabeth seriously. But more damning is the fact that everyone, Elizabeth included, believes the alleged gunman is a figment of Will's imagination; a residual affect of his previous hospitalization. Their doubt only serves to fortify the young man's resolve. He becomes so determined to prove the gunman's existence that he gets himself fired from his job as an engineer at his father's electric car company for missing too many days' work. In the meantime, Will becomes a target. Shady characters are following him, pursuing every shred of evidence he collects, threatening his life.
Here is where Johnson stirs the pot, or plot, as it were. Will's evidence begins to coalesce into a suspected conspiracy to fix the upcoming election that will determine the immediate fate of women's suffrage in Michigan. Johnson brings in one potential suspect after another as if each is just waiting in the wings for his or her cue. There is the head of the Michigan Liquor Association, an old high school classmate, private detective agents hired to protect Elizabeth, a former nemesis, plus the corrupt Detroit Police Department. Will barely knows which way to turn. Even his "allies", Detective Riordan and Elizabeth, remain doubtful of his reports, and their well-intentioned actions often only serve to thwart Will's efforts.
All of this is exquisitely laid out amid sumptuous descriptions of a time and a city so alive and vital as to leap off the page and embrace the reader in its grand exuberance. My only, albeit infinitesimal, complaint is that sometimes Johnson's story arc and wickedly sharp characterizations fall second place under the weight of these meticulously researched descriptions. But as I think about it, that may just be Johnson's secret to plot pacing. Because he is indeed a master at establishing a finely tuned tempo, holding a reader just breathless
enough to keep turning page after page.
Yessir. With all its mystery, thrills, moral, ethical and emotional dilemmas - even Will has self-doubts after suffering a day-and-a-half long blackout - to say nothing of Johnson's literary chiaroscuro, this is about as good as it gets. I say, if you read only only one amateur detective novel this year, make it this one.
-- About Books by Claire Ernsberger, PhD
Detroit Shuffle by D. E. Johnson (St. Martin’s Minotaur). Another historical mystery, but not at all exotic: Detroit just as it was becoming a great city—the 1920s. The third novel in what’s becoming a must-read private-eye series, clever, richly atmospheric, gritty and dark and cynical—think Philip Marlowe in Michigan but with colder weather and tighter plots.