Down and Out in the River City

WHY IS FRANCIS X. LENIHAN SKULKING AROUND HOPEVILE, the tent city on the banks of the Mississippi at St. Louis? No, he’s not trying to serve a summons, he’s looking for an answer as to why his card was found in the pocket of a young homeless man who died in this camp. It’s a mystery that Francis wants solved and so does Dr. Lambert, the father of the deceased and Francis’ new benefactor.

Lambert has hired Francis and his partner, Cale Twohey, to look into his son’s last months at Hopeville and what a gaggle of odd ducks they meet—ragged, forlorn indigents that society has scorned, a foot fetishist named Jesus, and Jacob Vorhof, The Soup Man, a stuttering psychopath whose choice of lethal weapon is a stash of opioids. It is 2017 and Francis, intrepid process server, is growing long in tooth. But is he any wiser, choosing to risk prison to delve into a string of killings at the camp?

Set against the tumult of civil unrest, Down And Out In The River City is briskly-written, a nail-biter with comic twists and turns, flush with flawed heroes and aspiring reprobates, wending their way through the seamy urban streets of St. Louis.