Their Kind of Town »

Their Kind of Town follows Richard Whittingham's previous bestselling novel State Street, called by the Chicago Tribune's reviewer "a top-flight detective novel as raw as life on the city's wintry streets . . . no novel I can recall . . . captures as well the essence of Chicago's dark side." Their Kind of Town is a multi-dimensioned work by a talented new novelist whose vision extends deep into Chicago's mean streets, its cops, its Outfit and especially a cast of characters worth knowing and remembering. Their Kind of Town features Joe Morrison, the streetwise - yet surprisingly vulnerable - ex-homicide cop who also figured prominently in State Street - of whom Mystery News said: "Like Chandler's Philip Marlowe, Hammett's Sam Spade, McBain's Steve Carella, there's a knowing guide for the territory - Joe Morrison."

Publishers Weekly

The hit, on a low-level mobster, is performed under a Chicago expressway by two hired guns, one of whom wears a ponytail. Also killed is a witness, a teenaged black gang member whose girlfriend escapes notice. She goes into hiding. So does the ponytail. Hunting them both is the mob, the dead youth's gang, Chicago cop Joe Morrison, last encountered in State Street , and ambitious journalist Holly Stryker, who smells a good story and goes after the divorced Morrison. The mob cast includes Angelo Franconi, in love with a boss's daughter, trying to be ``made'' and secretly spying for the Feds. A side plot about a shady character's seeking a corpse for a scam adds to the body count. Whittingham so effectively details the mean streets and projects of the Windy City that the accumulated grit nearly obliterates the predictability of the action. While the cop, the reporter and the gangsters are believable, fully developed characters, the demons that drive Angelo to his tortured life of split allegiances aren't fully probed--an ironic lack in a book that seems to go on too long. (June)