But like the city, the Motor City investigator keeps on trucking in the 13th novel of this highly praised series. Walker agrees to help a curator at the Detroit Institute of Arts recover a recently stolen medieval illuminated manuscript. But the meeting at a rundown porn theater is interrupted when Walker is distracted by a young woman, then shot at. When the smoke clears, the woman, the manuscript and the curator have all disappeared.

While tracking down the leads, Walker is also following a trail into his past. Twenty years ago, Dale Leopard, his boss and mentor, was found dead while on a case, and Earl North, the man who beat the charge, has reappeared, seeking the manuscript. Is there a connection between the murder and the Hours? Did North really kill Leopard?

Estleman’s prose sings like an aria. His metaphors and Walker’s observations strike just the right note. Estleman’s been around long enough so that comparing him to Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler isn’t an original thought, but it’s true and it’ll have to do. He gives Detroit its unique identity of a crumbling and crooked but proud city trying to find itself.

--William Peschel