Hidden Graves: (6 A Dek Elstrom Mystery)

Someone is trying to frame Chicago private investigator Dek Elstrom for murder in the latest intriguing mystery. It's election season in corrupt Cook County, Illinois - where the dead vote on who lives and who dies. A skeleton's hand spills out of an abandoned grain silo, aiming an axe at a candidate. A heavily-disguised woman hires PI Dek Elstrom to head west to find men with no pasts - and one with no present. While he's away, someone dead comes calling to frame him for murder.>br> A sheriff's deputy wants Dek arrested. Someone else wants him dead. No one knows what the woman who hasn't spoken in decades wants. And Dek Elstrom? He wants to stay alive.

About the Author :
Jack Fredrickson lives with his wife, Susan, west of Chicago. He is the author of four Dek Elstrom PI mysteries, two of which, A Safe Place for the Dying and Hunting Sweetie Rose, have been nominated for Shamus Awards. His third Shamus nomination is for his short story, The Ace I, which has been nominated for the Best PI Short Story of 2013.

Review :
A transparently phony case sends Dek Elstrom chasing phantoms down a long road just when he's most needed in the Windy City. Rosamund Reynolds, as she calls herself, offers Dek $4,000-half now, half later-if he'll check personally on the circumstances of three men: Gary Halvorson of Tucson, David Arlin of Laguna Beach, and Dainsto Runney, the preacher at Oregon's Church of the Reawakened Spirit. Everything about the job stinks to high heaven, but money is money, so Dek books the appropriate flights and quickly satisfies himself that Arlin is dead, blown up inside his house, and the other two subjects, both of them virtually invisible online, have vanished. Unfortunately, he identifies himself along the way to a Laguna Beach cop who phones him back in Chicago because he looks just as suspicious as his client, who's now vanished in turn. As if that weren't bad enough, someone's taken advantage of Dek's absence to frame him for murder back home. Working overtime and barely keeping the cops at bay, Dek identifies all three of his targets as members of the Four Musketeers, political workers who resigned from Delman Bean's congressional campaign the week before Election Day 1994 and left Chicago for jobs out West. The Fourth Musketeer, Timothy Wade, now a rising star running for the Senate, has just been well and truly spooked by a plastic skeleton armed with a toy ax that's been caught by TV news cameras falling out of a silo Wade was ceremonially attacking, sending the candidate scurrying from the scene. Just what are Wade and his invalid sister, Theresa, afraid of, and how is their fear connected to the fates of those other musketeers? The criminals are clever and the detective, after his initial benightedness, even more clever, making Fredrickson's sixth case one of his best. Publishers Weekly Chicago private investigator Dek Elstrom is having a hard time making ends meet, what with the recent collapse of his marriage, the scandal that wrecked his career, and the lack of an actual private investigator's license. When a woman hires Dek to confirm the whereabouts of three men, Dek's not exactly in a position to turn down the work, despite his client's deeply suspicious behavior (Why, for example, does she show up for their meeting wearing an obvious disguise?). When Dek discovers that one of the men is dead and the other two seem to have gone missing, not to mention the fact that the dead man may have taken on a new identity a couple of decades ago, he realizes he's stumbled onto the kind of case that could resurrect his career-if he can beat a (trumped-up) murder charge, that is. The writing here is splendid, echoing genre veteran Loren D. Estleman, and Dek Elstrom is the kind of guy we genuinely like spending time with. This is the sixth in the Elstrom series, and let's hope there will be many more to come. Booklist