ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY
Rated: A
Review date: January 18, 2008

Loren D. Estleman's knife-edged serial-killer thriller, Gas City is pared to its very bone. As a murderer's spree continues, the tensions simmering in a quiet oil-company town boil to the surface. Suddenly a powerful mafioso, a corrupt police chief, and the reporters covering the story find themselves pitted against one another in ways they never could have imagined. Estleman, in the leanest prose possible, brings to life not just his characters but the vices that fuel them and, in the process, exposes the gritty, ragged, sordid underbelly of urban life. He's been called an heir to Chandler — and it's easy to see why.

BOOKLIST
Review date: January 1, 2008
Starred

Francis X. Russell is Gas City's chief of police. For many years, he has maintained a gentleman's agreement with the local Mob boss, Anthony Zeno. The drugs, the illegal gambling, and the hookers stay within a small, clearly defined area of the city. In return, Russell receives financial consideration, and the city at large remains relatively crime free. When Russell's wife of 30-plus years succumbs to cancer, the chief has a crisis of conscience and begins raids into the restricted area. The repercussions are significant with a mayoral race approaching. Political alliances are altered, Zeno loses the endorsement of the out-of town
crime hierarchy to which he reports, Mob-controlled unions threaten strikes, and even the city's powerful Catholic church is knocked off balance. Mix in a serial killer dubbed "Beaver Cleaver" by the media and a doomed love affair between a disgraced cop and a hooker for what may be the prolific
Estleman's most thought-provoking and emotionally engaging novel among the 60 or so he's written. Its subject is contemporary rust-belt politics as a human phenomenon and the way that a politician's compromises can affect both the citizenry at large and the individuals who make up that citizenry. Each of
the half-dozen plotlines is executed flawlessly and presented in a context of moral ambiguity in which every choice—whether self-serving or altruistic—has consequences both good and evil. A magnificent crime novel.
— Wes Lukowsky

KIRKUS REVIEWS
Review Date: NOVEMBER 15, 2007
Starred
(A star is assigned to books of unusual merit, determined by the editors of Kirkus Reviews.)

Portrait of a city by an old master.
Police Chief Francis X. Russell has made his big, complex, oil refinery-dominated city among the most livable in the United States, according to some. He's also made a pact with the Devil, according to others. Newspaper publisher Joe Cicero puts the case this way: "Just because the trains run on time is no excuse to leave the crooks in charge." The crooks, in this case, are the Mafia, embodied locally by opera-loving Anthony Zeno, whose exterior only partially conceals the mind-set of an unregenerate killer. In cozy cahoots, the cop and the thug have long since arrived at an entente: Russell keeps his minions away from Gas City's seamy, steamy underbelly, aka the Circle, and in return he gets the rest of Gas City as a no-crooks zone, where wives, daughters and private property have been rendered sacrosanct. Moral codes aside, it's an obvious win-win situation. The bad guys roll in money; respectable Gas City breathes crime-free air. From time to time, it's true, there will be a bit of editorial fuming, but who takes newspapers seriously anymore? And then suddenly Russell's beloved spouse dies, leaving him bereft and rudderless—until, in some quite mysterious way, an epiphany happens. Russell becomes not only a changed man, but, to the dismay of certain entrenched interests—in and out of the Circle—a no-holds-barred reformer. Reprisals follow raids, of course, and respectable Gas City, its Edenic period a thing of the past, learns the hard way that honest government comes with a price tag.
The chronically undervalued Estleman ( American Detective, 2007, etc.) serves up what just might be the best novel about urban political corruption since Dashiel Hammett's The Glass Key.

PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Review Date: NOVEMBER 5, 2007
Starred

Shamus-winner Estleman, best known for his hard-boiled Amos Walker series (American Detective, etc.), creates a new, morally complex world in this razor-sharp tale of crime and corruption in a fictional eastern U.S. city. Gas City, once known as Garden Grove, has enjoyed stability as a result of understandings among the politicians, the police and the local gangsters. An enclave known as the Circle serves as the community's vice outlet, while the rest of the metropolis is virtually crime free. Police chief Francis Russell, after his wife's death, begins to question the devil's bargain he'd struck years earlier with mob boss Anthony Zeno. When Russell resumes acting like a lawman, virtually everyone in town feels the repercussions. Estleman masterfully creates a wide and diverse cast of characters, and sympathetically portrays their struggles to survive on the mean streets. A superfluous serial killer subplot doesn't detract from the author's achievement, which will justly be compared with that of James Ellroy's Los Angeles noir mysteries and John Gregory Dunne's True Confessions. Admirers of unsparing crime fiction will hope that Estleman plans to visit Gas City again.