Customer Reviews

Every Brilliant Eye (The Amos Walker Series #6)

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This is my first Loren D. Estleman book featuring his tough Detroit PI, Amos Walker. After the gratifying, but more "honored" works of James Lee Burke and Michael Connelley and Robert Crais, I found Estleman's hard-boiled prose imbued with the tough, wiseguy attitude both refreshing and perfectly pitched to capture the mean streets of the Motor City.

Upon finishing, I bought nearly a dozen of Estleman's Walker books on Amazon, ranging as far back as possible up to the present, and am working my way through this, to me, previously unknown, but very talented, and very prolific author's works. And I am enjoying it immensely.

"Every Brilliant Eye" is the sixth novel in the Amos Walker private detective series. Walker is a lonely, quick witted and highly principled P.I. who knows his native Detroit inside and out. In this novel, Walker is trying to locate an old friend he served with in Vietnam and in the process reveals more about his past than he ever had previously. He also becomes involved with the bewitching book editor Louise Starr, a holdover character from the previous Walker novel, "Sugartown." The only negative is that the story's police corruption angle is a bit shopworn. The Vietnam angle adds considerable weight and the ending is appropriately violent.

Look for the i-books vintage paperback edition of this novel to be released sometime in Summer 2001. The i-books editions of the Walker series are first rate paperbacks with extra goodies added, including an afterword by the author.

I picked this book up at a library sale with no previous knowledge of the Amos Walker novels. I have since read 6 of them. If you are a fine of private detective fiction you will enjoy these books. Amos Walker is the perfect PI, cynical, ethical to a fault, relentless, and gets beat up a lot. He also has a dry sense of humor that is reminiscent of Philip Marlowe without obviously mimicking him.

This is not the best Walker mystery but it's still a good read. I have never been to Detroit, but I imagine the board tourism there is not a fan of Amos Walker, his Detroit is a gritty, dangerous and desperate place full of neighborhoods no one should visit, fantastic fiction.

I'm a big Amos Walker fan, and Every Brilliant Eye was excellent! When Amos, a smart-talking Detroit private investigator is hired to investigate the disappearance of his friend- a Vietnam vet- Amos finds himself at odds with the police and a series of odd-ball thugs, in cluding a union boss and a serial killer.

In true Amos Walker fashion, he smart-talks, and one-liners his way through the plot, never relenting. Estleman has a great flare for writing and description.

Overall, an excellent book, a must-have installment for fans of Amos Walker.