Thunder City

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Thunder City presents Detroit in the process of becoming the Motor City. Harlan Crownover, scion of a great family of carriage makers, battles with his father to invest in a company run by Henry Ford, who has failed twice before in the automobile business. Desperate for funds, Harlan turns to Big .Jim Dolan, the Midwest's most powerful political boss, and Sal Borneo, a visionary mafioso struggling to bring the commerce of vice into the new century. Allies at first, they soon will be mortal enemies. At the crisis, only Edith Hampton Crownover, Harlan's troubled, aristocratic mother, will be in a position to shift the balance of power.From Publishers WeeklyDetroit is most of the setting for Estleman's crime dramas (he is also an acclaimed author of westerns), but the author sees seven of his novels in particular as forming a "Detroit Series," charting the city's history and telling in microcosm the history of the U.S. in the 20th century. This seventh and final installment, a colorful and suspenseful peek into mobster dens and automobile factories and boardrooms, rounds out the writer's chronicle of the Motor City. It is the first decade of the 20th century and Detroit is the bustling center of automobile development and manufacture. Harlan Crownover, son of a wealthy carriage-making tycoon, is swept up in the romance and novelty of the horseless carriage, much to his father's disgust and rage. Harlan, however, is a visionary and, seeing a future for the automobile, joins with Henry Ford to start the Ford Motor Company. Seeking investment money, Harlan first approaches Big Jim Dolan, a slick and powerful Irish politician with competing business interests, who sends Harlan packing. Harlan next strikes a deal with Sal Borneo, a shrewd and murderous Mafia boss who has no interest in automobiles, but who has something else in mind as the payoff for his investment. Invoking political expediency and threatening blackmail, Harlan's father induces Dolan and Borneo to join him in an unlikely conspiracy to ruin Ford and crush Harlan, but they underestimate their unconventional opponents in the legal, media and banking battles that result. Ford and Harlan's triumph over the cabal is exceedingly clever and satisfying, but it is Borneo's sharp forward-thinking vision that is most chilling. Profiting from Estleman's usual careful plotting, accurate backgrounds and crisp narrative, this is a gritty novel of high ideals and low morals, of men trying desperately to outwit one another whatever the cost in the heady days of invention and industry in Detroit. (Nov.) Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc. From Kirkus ReviewsFifth in the highly lauded series of Detroit novels that began with 1990's Whiskey River, a marvel of Prohibition-era description, and continued variously with Motown, King of the Corner, and, most recently, Edsel (1995). The story this time goes back to turn-of-the-century Detroit and Henry Fords third attempt to make his automobile factory solvent. Almost no one thinks that Fords horseless carriage will ever take off and pay for itselfno one but Harlan Crownover, widely seen as the slow-brained member of a family renowned for its business sense. Harlans father, Abner Crownover II, had risen from grease boy in his own fathers firm to youthful genius who turned the firm into one that built short-haul freight vehicles and passenger coaches. These were capped by the elegant Crownover opera coach, which rode on a superb suspension system invented by Abner II, subsequently patented, leased to all other coach makers, and insuring Abner II of millions of dollars for the rest of his life. Or as long as coaches are madeand now young Harlan is backing Henry Ford. Harlan goes to Big Jim Dolan, the citys street railway commissioner, for a $5,000 loan he plans to sink into Fords ingenious new assembly-line factory. When Dolan turns him down, Harlan hits up the Sicilian Prince, rising protection-racket boss Sal Borneo. Aside from being a health faddist, Borneo, tied to Dolan, has his hand in the city governmentand into Ford by way of Harlan? Will Ford solve his rear-axle problem by stealing Abner II's spring suspension system? Will Harlan eventually take over the factory and become the new Coach Prince? Will bloody Sal turn on Harlan? A tour de force of descriptive energy, researched to hairs-breadth accuracy of detail, and packed with characters vivid enough to make Frank Norris dance a jig with Theodore Dreiser. Estlemans final cut on this epic series should be a single chronological, chrome-plated volume of mirror-clear prose. -- Copyright ©1999, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.