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Product Description
In Puritan days, a "witchfinder" was the man responsible for accumulating the evidence that would put an accused witch on the gallows...or, rather, to manufacture it. At least according to Stuart Lund, the florid and flamboyant attorney for legendary architect Jay Bell Furlong, America's greatest designer since Frank Lloyd Wright...and the richest. The architect had had Wright's libido as well as his talent: he had married, over the age of eighty, an alluring young designer in his firm. Now, as he lies on his deathbed, his ex-wives and children wrangle over his fortune, and a photo arrives in the mail of Lily, his young wife, naked in the embrace of another man...Amos Walker's task: to find the witchfinder.
Amazon.com Review
"Stuart Lund came in at six-two and three hundred pounds in gray silk tailoring with a large head of wavy yellow hair, blue eyes like wax drippings, and a black chevron-shaped moustache he hadn't bothered to bleach." That description of a lawyer who summons private detective Amos Walker to a secret meeting with Jay Bell Furlong, a world-famous architect who is supposedly dying in Los Angeles, could have come straight from Raymond Chandler. So could characters with names like Royce Grayling and Lynn Arsenault. That's why Chandler fans should rejoice that Loren D. Estleman's Walker--who first appeared in 1997's Never Street--returns in grand style in The Witchfinder. Walking the wickedly hot streets of a Detroit described as vividly and lovingly as Chandler's Los Angeles, Walker searches for the nasty parties who faked a photo that shows Furlong's much younger lady friend in bed with another man, thereby scuttling the architect's last chance for romance. Walker takes a bullet to the head, sneaks out of the hospital too early, and generally behaves as though he hasn't heard that this classic branch of the mystery tree has been declared dead by so-called experts. Other Estleman outings in paperback include Red Highway, Stamping Ground, and Stress.
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