This is Edgar nominee Walker’s first stand-alone thriller. Readers should be hooked from the first scene. In it, self-described loser Charlie Long, just fired from his low-level city job, is nursing his pain with a few beers in Chicago’s famously seedy Billy Goat tavern. A man leading a young boy passes Charlie—and it’s the kid’s eyes, full of fear, that pushes Charlie off the bar stool, down the hall, past the washroom the man has pushed the kid into, and into the back alley where he sees the man gunned down. What follows Charlie’s instinctive grab of the kid in hiding is a plunge into a protracted chase scene, with thugs on Charlie and the kid’s trail through a wonderfully sustained suspense story.
