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This page lists novels that feature the Detroit based private investigator Amos Walker.

Motor City Blue

Loren D. Estleman

1980

An Amos Walker novel.

"Private eye Amos Walker is a Vietnam veteran who was thrown out of the Police Academy for punching a fellow cadet. He’s a hard man in a ruined city, scratching out a living looking for lost things. Walker’s latest case comes by way of ex-mobster Ben Morningstar, who’s been living out his retirement in Phoenix while raising Maria, the daughter of a long-ago murdered friend. Only now, Maria is missing and the gangster needs Walker’s help. But the trail has gone cold—the only clue is a faded pornographic snapshot. Never one to give up, Walker witnesses the kidnapping of a former Vietnam friend and solves the murder of a young black labor leader while slugging his way to a solution."

Angel Eyes

Loren D. Estleman

1981

An Amos Walker novel.

"Amos Walker has seen a lot. But he’s never encountered anything quite like his newest assignment. Ann Maringer, an aging stripper hard at work at one of the city’s many low-grade joints, hires him to find a missing person: herself. She expects to disappear any day now, she says, and she wants to be found. He goes to her apartment the next day, hoping for more information, but Ann was true to her word and has disappeared completely, leaving behind nothing but a carton of Bel-Airs and a dead man on the floor. Unshaken by the body or the circumstances, Walker sets out to find his client. After all, she paid in advance."

The Midnight Man

Loren D. Estleman

1982

An Amos Walker novel.

"A routine case puts Amos Walker on the highway to Ann Arbor, but the trip turns deadly just a few miles outside of Detroit. Tailing a trucker suspected of faking hijackings, Walker does his best to keep a safe distance, but is recognized anyway. The trucker runs him off the road, and it’s only the tight handling of an American-made Cutlass that keeps Walker from becoming roadkill. A good-natured policeman helps him out, and the detective continues on his way. But the next day, a bullet near the spine sends Walker’s new friend into intensive care, and Walker sets out to find the scum who shot the cop."

The Glass Highway

Loren D. Estleman

1983

An Amos Walker novel.

"On screen, Sandy Broderick is everything a newscaster is supposed to be. He has a deep voice, a ten-thousand-watt smile, and the God-given ability to banter with weathermen until his ears fall off. But when the cameras turn off, he has a private problem: His twenty-year old son, Bud, has disappeared. Amos Walker is going to find him. The boy and his junkie girlfriend are both gone, and Broderick is terrified - not for his son, but for his career. The station is about to do an exposé on drugs in Detroit, and the newscaster doesn’t want his boy’s addict girlfriend to get in the way of his Pulitzer. This new client may be sleazy, but Walker handles scum for a living, and it’s time to go to work."

Sugartown

Loren D. Estleman

1985

An Amos Walker novel.

"Spring has come to Detroit's Sugartown enclave, and Amos Walker would like to feel kindly toward the human race. Unfortunately, his first case of the new season immediately leads him into trouble among the Polish settlers of neighboring Hamtramck, when old Martha Evancek hires him to look for her missing grandson. But even before Walker gets a chance to investigate, he's presented with a second case: an eminent Russian novelist who fears that someone is out to kill him. Walker knows the two cases are connected, but finding that link might cost him his life."

Every Brilliant Eye

Loren D. Estleman

1986

An Amos Walker novel.

"Barry Stackpole was tough once. Amos Walker met him in a Cambodian shell crater when Walker was serving his country and Stackpole was on the payroll of the Detroit News, and they formed the kind of bond that war often creates. At war’s end, they returned to the Motor City, where Stackpole took to reporting crimes and Walker to solving them. A violent run-in with a big time mobster left Stackpole a leg and two fingers short, and he became an alcoholic. He has made several attempts to get his life straight since, but never quite managed. Now he’s fallen off the wagon again, harder than ever before, and his girlfriend begs Walker to find him before he drinks himself to death. But in Detroit, death can find a man in many ways."

Lady Yesterday

Loren D. Estleman

1987

An Amos Walker novel.

"Iris was a great beauty when Amos Walker first saw her—a Jamaican goddess striding stark naked through an unworthy whorehouse. When he bumps into her at a high-class steakhouse just outside of Detroit, she still looks good. She’s come back from the Caribbean to seek out her father. Raised by her mother, Iris grew up thinking the man was dead, but has just learned the old trombone player may still be alive. Walker offers to dig for him: a welcome-home present for an old flame. The search leads him straight to the dark heart of the Detroit jazz scene, a seedy world where Walker is right at home, and into the crosshairs of some of the cruelest men in a very mean town."

Downriver

Loren D. Estleman

1988

An Amos Walker novel.

"Countless tragedies occurred in the three days of the 1967 Detroit riots, and one of them belonged to Richard DeVries. A twenty-two-year-old black man about to get his chance to play for the Pistons, he was spotted tossing a Molotov cocktail at an abandoned building and arrested on the spot. The police added armed robbery to the arson charge, and sent DeVries up the river for knocking over an armored car that he had never seen before. Twenty years later he’s set free, and the first man he calls on is Amos Walker. With twenty years of savings he buys a month of Walker’s time, asking him for help finding the men who robbed the armored car. DeVries has already paid for stealing that $200,000, and now it’s time to collect it."

General Murders

Loren D. Estleman

1988

Amos Walker short stories.

"With his usual knife-sharp prose in cutting form, Estleman proves that he can carve a short story as cleanly as the full-length Walker tales."

Silent Thunder

Loren D. Estleman

1989

An Amos Walker novel.

"The tabloids were full of it. Constance Thayer, after a night of clubbing, drinks and drugs, had taken an automatic pistol from the collection of her industrialist husband Doyle Thayer Jr. and emptied it into his back, as he lay naked and unconscious in their Iroquois Heights home. The news of Constance Thayer's X-rated past breathed new life into the scandal for another month. Walker's job was to gather enough dirt on the late Mr. Thayer to make his widow look clean by comparison. What he found was a monstrous magnate, a dubious corpse and a gang of country-style gunrunners."

Sweet Women Lie

Loren D. Estleman

1990

An Amos Walker novel.

"Walker's problem begins with a simple proposition from a former Hollywood beach bunny concerning a quarter of a million dollars. From there it moves into a bittersweet reunion with his past: his ex-wife suddenly turns up to trap him in an embrace of danger. Events move swiftly from money to murder, as Walker struggles in an ever-tightening tangle of sweet lies and fatal truths. It's a case of love and treason...of spies and cyanide...of kill, be killed, or run like hell. It's a game played on the landscape of the past and present...a game someone is playing like there's no tomorrow - for Walker."

Never Street

Loren D. Estleman

1997

An Amos Walker novel.

"What could be more innocent than watching old movies? For Neil Catalin, a wealthy man with a happy home, old-fashioned pictures were a hobby that became an obsession. But he wasn’t watching The Wizard of Oz. Crime movies were his passion, the sort where life is cheap and death is free, and Catalin sank himself into them as an escape from the stresses of suburbia, when soaring debt threatened to overwhelm the life he had created. Now he has disappeared, and his wife believes the clue may be in his collection of gruesome classics. She calls on Amos Walker, who ventures into a black-and-white past in his hunt for the missing man. The journey is far from escapism, because this is Detroit, where the guns don’t fire blanks."

The Witch Finder

Loren D. Estleman

1998

An Amos Walker novel.

"The world is waiting for Jay Bell Furlong to die. The grand old man of American architecture is on deathwatch in a Los Angeles hospital, and it won’t be long before his obituary hits the front page. Only Amos Walker knows that the impending death is a bit farther off than that. In fact, Furlong has just become Walker’s client. The architect is still near death, yes, but far from the hospital. Before he goes, he has an item of revenge he wants seen to, and Walker is to be his instrument. Eight years prior, a salacious photo caused Furlong to cut loose his young lover, a photo he has now learned is a fake. He hires Walker to find out who poisoned his happiness, so that he can repay the favor before it’s too late."

The Hours of the Virgin

Loren D. Estleman

1999

An Amos Walker novel.

"Hired by a curator at the Detroit Institute of Arts to serve as his bodyguard during a transaction involving a stolen illuminated manuscript, Amos Walker enters a darkened skin-flick theater where the exchange is supposed to take place. When the deal goes south, he’s lucky to leave with his life . . . and a new lead to pursue in collaring the man who murdered his partner 20 years ago. In a case that features a wheelchair-bound pornographer and rare book collector, an ultra-slick art expert, a trophy wife, and a white-collar criminal, Walker faces one of the greatest challenges of his career as a present-day crime draws him back to one of the darkest episodes of his past."

A Smile on the Face of the Tiger

Loren D. Estleman

2000

An Amos Walker novel.

"Amos Walker is on the case of the aging pulp fiction writer Eugene Booth who has run out on a publishing deal that was supposed to revive his one-lucrative career. Plunging into booth's seedy world, Walker's chase eventually brings him to a lakeside bungalow in Michigan where he finds Booth pounding out his first novel in a decade with the aid of a 50-year-old Smith Corona and a bottle of Bourbon. The writer reveals to Walker that the events recounted in his long-ago bestseller, Paradise Valley, are a lie, and that the truth will be told in his new book. But when Walker returns to see Booth again, he finds the novelist hanging in the bathroom...and the pages he has written missing. Now it is up to Amos Walker to find the truth behind the supposed suicide of a belatedly honest man and to fulfil the victim's last wish - to share that truth with the rest of the world."

Sinister Heights

Loren D. Estleman

2002

An Amos Walker novel.

"Leland Stutch was building automobiles before Henry Ford ever dreamed up the Model T. He dominated Detroit for most of the 20th century as the auto industry soared and then began its long, slow descent. When Stutch’s widow contacts Amos Walker, the private eye expects to meet a doddering old lady. Instead he encounters Rayellen, a 30-something beauty with washboard abs and 1 of the most unusual propositions he’s ever heard. Unconcerned with matrimonial vows, the most powerful man in Detroit left mistresses—and love children—all over Michigan. To stave off any future paternity suits, Rayellen hires Walker to locate Stutch’s illegitimate offspring and pay them off—a seemingly simple task that draws the detective into a dysfunctional family’s war zone and a violent case of kidnapping and murder."

Poison Blonde

Loren D. Estleman

2003

An Amos Walker novel.

"Who is Gilia Cristobal? She's simply one of the hottest of hot Latina singers. Nothing in her life, however, is simple. In her native land she was involved with people the government didn't like, and she barely escaped with her life to start fresh in the United States. In her wake she left behind accusations about a former lover, about violence, and about blackmail. Now she's in Detroit to make music and wants Amos Walker to protect her from those who have threatened her life. She also wants him to investigate someone from the darkest chapter of her former life. When Walker realizes that Gilia's main man, recently out of prison, doesn't regret the time he nearly killed Walker, what first seemed like an easy payday starts looking more and more like a losing proposition. Latin heat, indeed."

Retro

Loren D. Estleman

2004

An Amos Walker novel.

"Walker has made a lot of friends - and more than a few enemies - in his years as a detective in Detroit, but he finds more trouble than he expected when he agrees to grant the deathbed wish of Beryl Garnet, a successful madam, for her son to get her ashes when she's gone. Walker successfully locates her son in Canada, where he has been evading the law since protesting the Vietnam War in the 1960s, but no sooner has Walker settled back in Detroit that the news comes that Garnet's son is dead. Now Walker is the prime suspect. He has little choice but to find out who might have done the deed and tried to pin the blame on him...and in the process he discovers another murder, the one of 1940s boxer Curtis Smallwood, who happens to have been the dead man's father. Complicating matters, the two murders, fifty-three years apart, were committed with the very same gun. The same gun, in a place impossible for a gun to be."

Nicotine Kiss

Loren D. Estleman

2006

An Amos Walker novel.

"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 and the leads are few. One lead is Homeland Security agent H. Clemson. The Fed also seeks Starzek, whom he believes may be working for a counterfeiting operation with ties to terrorists. Though Walker doubts Starzek is a terrorist, he finds blank treasury paper at an evangelical church belonging to Starzek's brother. Then Starzek's brother disappears too. Back to square one, Walker follows his best hunch, driving Starzek's usual cigarette route along the Lake Huron shore, and finally gets a solid lead on the paper hangers. But before Walker can break the case, someone tries to shoot him-and he's accused of murder. In the end, Walker will need all of his fortitude to stay alive long enough to figure out who's doing what to whom, in time to save his friend's life."

American Detective

Loren D. Estleman

2007

An Amos Walker novel.

"Former Detroit Tigers pitcher Darius Fuller wants Walker to break off his daughter's engagement to Hilary Bairn, a man Fuller believes is after her two million dollar trust. Walker breaks into Bairn's apartment, only to be ambushed by cops. A murder has taken place, and the victim is Fuller's daughter. Walker and the cops assume that Bairn is the murderer, but Walker has no idea what he is getting into. Walker is led to a meeting with a casino owner, who tells him Bairn owed money to a loan shark. The loan shark tells Walker that he is not the only one after Bairn. Soon Walker finds himself on the run from crooked cops and vile gangsters. Every time Walker thinks he's solved the case, he finds out he is further from the truth than when he started."

The Left-handed Dollar

Loren D. Estleman

2010

An Amos Walker novel.

"Joseph Michael Ballista knows most of the ways to make an illegal buck, or 'a lefthanded dollar.' That’s why he’s in trouble again. But his crafty lawyer, Lucille Lettermore is determined to free him by getting all his previous convictions set aside, beginning with one for attempted murder. She hires Detroit private detective Amos Walker to investigate the old crime. Walker’s first problem? The intended victim was investigative reporter Barry Stackpole, Walker’s only true friend. Walker’s not thrilled to help get his buddy’s would-be killer off the hook. But money’s money, so he takes the case, though it won’t be easy. For starters, the creep’s ex-wives grudgingly talk to Walker, but he knows they’re not leveling with him. And two new murders tied to the case aren’t likely to make them any chattier. Walker, friendless and desperate for answers, follows a string of leads old and new straight into a war of nerves and bullets in Detroit’s seedy, crime-ridden underbelly."

Amos Walker: The Complete Story Collection

Loren D. Estleman

2010

Amos Walker short stories.

"Thirty years ago Loren D. Estleman introduced the world to his Detroit detective Amos Walker. In celebration of this anniversary, Estleman has collected every previously published Walker short story in this massive volume, including a brand-new story never before published."

• Greektown
• Robbers' Roost
• Fast Burn
• Dead Soldier
• Eight Mile & Dequindre
• I'm In The Book
• Bodyguards Shoot Second
• Prettiest Dead Girl In Detroit
• Blond And Blue
• Bloody July
• Anniversary Waltz
• Needle
• Cigarette Stop
• Deadly Force
• People Who Kill
• Pickups And Shotguns
• Crooked Way
• Redneck
• Dogs
• Safe House
• Kill The Cat
• Slipstream
• Lady On Ice
• Snow Angels
• Major Crimes
• Square One
• Man Who Loved Noir
• Sunday
• Necessary Evil
• Trust Me
• Woodward Plan
• Rumble Strip
• Sometimes A Hyena

Infernal Angels

Loren D. Estleman

2011

An Amos Walker novel.

"Private detective Amos Walker has long been reluctant to embrace technology; it was not until recently that Walker got his first cell phone. Now, in Infernal Angels, Walker is hired to do a twenty-first–century job—recovering stolen HDTV converter boxes. Before long, the case turns old-school: All the suspects and the man who lost the boxes are murdered, and Walker ends up working with both the local police and the feds of Detroit. The converter boxes were being used to smuggle high-grade heroin that's been killing off junkies left and right, and it's up to Walker to track down the missing dope and the person behind the trail of dead bodies. Old friends and even older enemies will resurface before this story is done, and Walker will have to take a few beatings if he wants to bring the drug smugglers to justice. This old dog still has a few new tricks, and there hasn't been a case yet that Walker couldn't crack."

Burning Midnight

Loren D. Estleman

2012

An Amos Walker novel.

"Amos Walker knows Detroit, from the highest to the lowest, and that includes the gangs of Mexicantown. When a friend asks Walker to get his son's brother-in-law out of one of two feuding gangs, Walker gets in trouble fast. First, dead bodies start to pile up; then come suspicious fires and the bottle bombs. Walker is caught in the middle of a gang war. Whether or not a middle-aged gringo like him can cool things off between the Maldados and the Zapatistas, he's got to try; he did promise his friend. Once he gets involved, he realizes there's something else going on; the specter of an international conspiracy threatens to make this local trouble blow sky-high. And if he ends up dead or in jail for murders he didn't commit, he might have to put that promise on hold. It's tough being Amos Walker."

Don't Look for Me

Loren D. Estleman

2014

An Amos Walker novel.

"The missing woman has left a handwritten note that said, "Don't look for me." Any P.I. would take that as a challenge, especially when he found out that she'd left the same message once before, when having an illicit affair. The trail leads Walker to an herbal remedies store, where the beautiful young clerk knows nothing about the dead body in the basement…or about any illegal activity that might be connected to the corpse. But he can't tarry long, for the Mafia could be involved or maybe there's a connection to the porno film studio where the missing woman's former maid now works. But when two Mossad agents accost Walker - and then are brutally killed - he realizes he's discovered a plot far darker run by someone more deadly than either the Detroit Mafia or a two-bit porn pusher."

You Know Who Killed Me

Loren D. Estleman

2014

An Amos Walker novel.

"Just released from a rehab clinic, the Detroit private detective has to marshal his energies to help solve a murder in Iroquois Heights, his least favorite town. The area is flooded with billboards rented by the widow of Donald Gates, an ordinary suburbanite found shot to death in his basement on New Year's Eve: "YOU KNOW WHO KILLED ME!" they read, above the number of the sheriff's tip line. Complicating matters is a $10,000 reward for information leading to the arrest and conviction of the murderer, offered by an anonymous donor through the dead man's place of worship. Initially hired by the sheriff's department to run down anonymous tips, Walker investigates further."

The Sundown Speech

Loren D. Estleman

2015

An Amos Walker novel.

"Amos Walker is hired by Helen and Dante Gunner, a bohemian Ann Arbor couple, to find Jerry Marcus, a film director who has disappeared with their investment money. It's one of Walker's easiest jobs to date. In just a few short hours, Walker locates Marcus in his bedroom...murdered, his body shoved into a cupboard, a bullet through his head. This case is opened and shut quickly, but Walker can't quite let it go. When Dante is arrested for the murder Walker finds himself again in Helen's employ, this time trying to prove that Dante didn't do it."

The Lioness Is the Hunter

Loren D. Estleman

2017

An Amos Walker novel.

"Detroit entrepreneur Carl Fannon hires Walker to trace Emil Haas, his partner, whose sudden disappearance has jeopardized their firm’s plans to purchase the historic Sentinel Building. Almost immediately, the missing man shows up and asks the detective to meet him in the empty Sentinel to discuss a top-secret concern. Walker complies, only to find not Haas, but Fannon’s suffocated corpse locked in a basement vault. When Gwendolyn Haas, the partner’s adult daughter, enters the picture, the client number rises to three, including one missing and one murdered. But the worst is yet to come: Emil Haas’s “concern” is that Fannon’s been buying up depressed real estate on behalf of Charlotte Sing, the international fugitive Walker knows only too well as Madam Sing. Madam Sing is believed to have been executed in Asia for capital crimes without number, but instead may be engaged in rebuilding her fortune to relaunch her assault on civilization."

Black and White Ball

Loren D. Estleman

2018

An Amos Walker and Peter Macklin novel.

"Detroit hit man Peter Macklin forces private eye Amos Walker to furnish protection for Laurie, Macklin's estranged wife, while Macklin tracks down the party who has threatened to kill her. The man Walker's client suspects cannot be ignored; as his own grown son, Roger Macklin has inherited all the instincts, and acquired all the training, necessary to carry out his threat. Told partly by Walker in first-person and partly by Macklin in third, Black and White Ball places the detective squarely between two remorseless killers, with death waiting whether he succeeds or fails."