Minnesota Strip

Dan Fortune, the one-armed private detective of the Edgar Allan Poe Award-winning series, goes on the hunt for a young idealist missing in New York City in a suspense-filled mystery Library Journal labeled "powerful." It's 1987, and Eighth Avenue between 42nd and 57th streets is notorious for prostitution and crimes of violence. Locals and the cops call it the Minnesota Strip because so many of the hookers are runaways from the Midwest. It's here that a beautiful Vietnamese woman comes to find fame, but instead ends up savagely gunned down in an alley behind a bar, where thieves strip off her jewelry, clothes, high heels, even her bra and panties. The police have no way to identify her. But then a young man from Long Island arrives and gives them her name. Soon he's gone, and no one seems to know where. The fellow's girlfriend, Judy Lavelle, unsophisticated and worried, hires Fortune to find him. "There were so many detectives in the phone book," she explains. "Your name sounded like good luck: Dan Fortune." Fortune, the hard-boiled philosopher-maverick, remains the real deal. He favors Beck's beer, packs his "old cannon," never lies to the police, and is unintimidated by men wearing regimental neckties. He's thinking about leaving New York: Kay Michaels, his lover in Santa Barbara, is enticing him to move to California permanently. But not yet - Fortune has a case. As it turns out, by looking for Judy's boyfriend, he's also looking for who killed the Vietnamese girl. From a shabby brothel in Chelsea to the opulent mansion of a California businessman, he discovers that someone else wants not only to solve the murder but also to avenge the victim's death. This novel is about the aftermath of war, and the trail leads Fortune through a maze of white slavery, prostitution, and smuggling, with a climax that at once shocks and satisfies.