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A Smile on the Face of the Tiger |
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 A Smile on the Face of the Tiger byLoren D. Estleman Warner Books (Mysterious Press) 288 pages, August 2000 ISBN 0892967064 Reviewed by Lisa Eagleson-Roever A Smile on the Face of the Tiger kept putting smile after smile on my face as I read it. Estleman's Amos Walker is sarcastic, as you'd expect with a detective novel, but not suicidally so, and the dialogue sounds like something you might hear sitting in a restaurant. This was something I especially appreciated. Estleman's sense of humor is a delight. He comments about current events without using them as a crutch; he makes it fun to read between the lines. Amos Walker is asked by a publisher friend Louise Starr to find her missing author. She desperately needs a sure thing to kick-start her new publishing house, and she's sure Eugene Booth is the right author for her. Old fashioned detective stories are in vogue again, thanks to the resurgence of swing dancing and big band music, and Booth was once king of the paperback thriller. Starr hopes to put both their names in the spotlight by reprinting Booth's most controversial novel, Paradise Valley - a hot-from-the-presses fictionalized account of Detroit's 1943 race riot. But why did Booth suddenly return her generous check and her contract and then disappear? That's what Amos needs to find out. What Amos thinks is a routine assignment turns into, of course, something else entirely. Estleman will keep you guessing. A hint? From the novel itself, a conversation between Amos and Booth about Paradise Valley: "Nobody wants fiction to be real. The people who buy books and go to the movies want the hero to snatch the heroine off the conveyor belt before the buzzsaw gets her... Even after the rewrite there was just enough truth in it to turn away readers in herds." "What did you want to say? Sometimes the hero does get there before the buzzsaw?" He nodded. "And when he does, sometimes he just turns up the speed." Every character in A Smile on the Face of the Tiger is a little like the tiger - there's someone else making him smile. Amos' real job is to enter the tigers' cage and figure out why each tiger is smiling. |
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