Book list
From Booklist, Copyright © American Library Association. Used with permission.

There is no form of crime fiction at which Perry doesn’t excel, and he’s tried them all . . . except, perhaps, cozies, although he can mix domestic comedy with the hard stuff just fine. Here he’s in full action mode, borrowing a little from Hammett’s Red Harvest, about a gang that takes over a town and then comes up against a very determined avenger. Perry also touched on that theme in A Small Town (2020), but there the gang of baddies grabbed the town the old-fashioned way: pillage, rape, murder. Here it’s trickier. A crew of freelance thugs systematically gains control of a string of smallish Indiana towns, peddling protection and roughing up anyone who doesn’t pay. But why? Is there an endgame? Ellen Leicester, a U.S. district attorney in Chicago, wants to know, so she calls her ex-husband, unorthodox PI Harry Duncan. Dispatched to Indiana, Duncan starts digging, immediately encountering resistance from sundry thugs whom Harry quickly dispatches—only to realize that there are more of them and they keep coming. So begins a many-pronged chase novel: thugs after Harry, Harry after the backstory. It’s a testament to Perry’s skill that the scenes of Harry at the Hall of Records, piecing together what’s behind the thugs’ power play, are every bit as compelling as the various escapes he engineers along the way. Harry is a thinking person’s action hero, and Perry is the ultimate thinking person’s thriller writer.

Kirkus
Copyright © Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

A Chicago cop–turned–private eye agrees to turn over some rocks in nearby Indiana and finds nasty things under every single one. U.S. Attorney Ellen Leicester suspects that someone’s gearing up to coordinate and extend midlevel crimes in the area. Since her suspicions aren’t enough to shake loose government funding, she turns to Harry Duncan, whom she hasn’t seen since their marriage ended 15 years ago, for “a scouting mission.” Planning to say no, Duncan says yes instead and goes looking for bad buys in Parkman’s Elbow, Indiana. He doesn’t have to look hard at all, because enterprising bad guys are already looking for him. A pair of them passing themselves off as cops try to get him to pay them off not to tow his car, whose paperwork they claim is irregular, from the parking lot of The Elbow Room. Duncan makes short work of these lowlifes, and the three Clark brothers, who come to extort protection money from Renee Parkman at The Elbow Room, don’t last much longer. But Duncan’s labors are only beginning, for Ellen’s suspicions about the tentacles of organized crime are right on the money. Gerald Russell, a realtor working for faceless overlords in Chicago, is systematically putting pressure on many local establishments, squeezing them for payoffs with the ultimate goal of bankrupting and buying their businesses at a steep discount. Jeanette Walrath, the assassin Russell hires to smooth the rough edges, poses dangers of her own. What worries Duncan most, though, is his sudden inability to get his ex to pick up the phone. Could there be a mole in her own office? Top-drawer thrills from an author whose hard-nosed hero is as professional as he is. Copyright © Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Publishers Weekly
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

Chicago PI Harry Duncan, the protagonist of this strong crime novel from Edgar winner Perry (The Old Man), accepts a contract from his ex-wife, Ellen Leicester, the U.S. Attorney for the Northern District of Illinois, to investigate a sudden spike in criminal activity in small towns along Indiana’s Ash River (“Assaults and robberies by teams rather than individuals, extortion, and that sort of thing”). Ellen believes that organized crime elements in Chicago are making a move to expand operations into Indiana, and Duncan’s task is to scout out the territory and report back to her on whether an FBI investigation is warranted. Duncan makes his first stop at a bar by the river for a bite to eat and winds up contending with two thugs in the bar’s parking lot who try to steal his car. Tough, self-reliant, and fearless, Duncan soon plunges into a full-scale battle with hired crooks intent on seizing control of the entire region, and lives are suddenly at stake—including his own. The pages melt away as the story maintains a breathless pace throughout. This is further proof that Perry is a dominating force in the world of contemporary suspense thrillers. Hopefully, Duncan will be back for an encore. Agent: Mel Berger, WME. (Jan.)