Books by Loren D. Estleman

When Amos Walker revisits novelist Eugene Booth at his lakeside bungalow in Michigan, he finds him hanging in the bathroom with the pages he has written missing. Amos must find the truth behind the supposed suicide and fulfil the victim's last wish - to share that truth with the rest of the world.

The first edition of The Wister Trace was published in 1987, when Larry McMurtry had just reinvented himself and Cormac McCarthy's career had not yet taken off. Loren Estleman's update connects these new masters with older writers, assesses the genre's past, present, and future, and takes account of the renaissance of western movies.

Amos Walker, the quintessential hardboiled detective, is mortal after all. Jeff Starzek, an old friend who smuggles cigarettes for a living, saved Amos Walker's life, bringing him to a hospital after Walker took a bullet to the leg. A month later, Walker, still convalescing, gets a panicked phone call from Starzek's sister. Jeff is missing.

The undertaker practices the Dismal Trade with consummate skill. He has raised it to an art through the high craft of the Connable Method. He has transformed the ugliness of death into a thing of dignity and beauty. Victims brutalized by war, street fights, fires - every hazard in a raw West - in his hands, become presentable.