From Publishers Weekly:
The author of the excellent, unfettered Fang Mulheisen stories (Man With an Axe, 1998) shifts direction in both subject and style with this historical novel. Union activist Frank Little is murdered in the copper mining town of Butte, Mont., in 1917. More a patsy than a plotter, Goodwin Ryder is a young Pinkerton detective who arrives in town, befriends Little, falls for a miner's wife and struggles vainly both to save his job and to save Little, a charismatic orator, a homosexual and the man Ryder's sinister superiors want dead. The narrative fast-forwards about 30 years to Hollywood where Ryder has become a pulp-fiction writer and a drunk who gets a chance to come clean about his role in Little's untimely death. Although Jackson imparts no fresh Tinseltown lore, the second section possesses far more life than the scenes set in Montana. Aimed at readers interested in the period and places, this novel doesn't offer much to satisfy fans of Fang.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Booklist:
It's 1917, and Goodwin Ryder, a naive young Baltimore street kid, is eager to start his first assignment with a detective agency. He must infiltrate the union run by Frank Little, which is currently crippling copper mines in Butte, Montana. The escalating involvement of the U.S. in World War I and the increasing copper prices are the key reasons the pressure to end the strike is so keen. Ryder initially sees the issue in black-and-white terms: labor is bad, business is good; however, he eventually realizes that he has much more in common with the miners than with the companies for which he works. Unable to free himself from the agency, he becomes an unwitting accomplice in the lynching death of Little. Author Jackson, best known for his Fang Mulheisen detective series, has taken a little-known historical incident and woven it into a fascinating tapestry of time, place, atmosphere, and character. Wes Lukowsky
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