Will you still love me tomorrow? A mystery

Joe McCarthy's better-dead-than-red mentality has penetrated even the small Iowa burg of Black River Falls, where young Sam McCain supplements his earnings as a lawyer by working as a private investigator. At the conclusion of a photo-op appearance by touring Soviet premier Nikita Khruschev, former State Department official and Black River Falls resident, Richard Conners, a notorious liberal, indicates he'd like to hire McCain. He shows up at McCain's apartment a day later, near death, but he won't expose his attacker. McCain has no faith in the investigative ability of local law enforcement, so he proceeds on his own. In short order, he's also confronted with the deaths of a former FBI agent now fronting an anti-Communist organization and two other right-wing activists. The third Sam McCain case is as compelling and entertaining as its predecessors. Gorman, an underappreciated master of the genre, has created an insular, self-contained world in Black River Falls, where good and evil clash with the same heartbreaking results as they have in the more urban crime dramas of Block or Leonard. --Wes Lukowsky

In 1959, anti-Communist sentiment runs highDeven in the Iowa town of Black River Falls. There, a murderer deposits the body of an alleged Communist sympathizer on the doorstep of PI Sam McCain (Wake Up Little Susie). Things really heat up after the two prime suspects also turn up dead. Exciting and intense, this is for fans of the series and historical mysteries. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

What on earth has gotten into the good people of Black River Falls? Instead of observing the courtesies that bond them together into a solid slice of ’50s Americana—except of course when they’re killing each other (Wake Up Little Susie, 2000, etc.)—they’re turning on each other with unprecedented ferocity, accusing each other of disloyalty, treason, and communist sympathies. Inflamed by Khrushchev’s historic 1959 visit to Iowa, an anonymous correspondent sends a blood-red hammer and sickle to bestselling social utopian Prof. Richard Conners. Conners demands that lawyer/shamus Sam McCain investigate the threat, but before Sam can lift a finger to help, he opens his office door to find his client dying on his doorstep, closely followed by all-American school board activist Jeff Cronin and fake FBI agent Karl Rivers, who’d rather be dead than red. Though anticommunist hysteria certainly has the potential to unify all the hostilities sweeping through town, it gets upstaged, as usual, by the loving period detail (a Nash and a Studebaker both feature prominently in Sam’s adventures) and the endless complications of Sam’s triangular love life (Rexall clerk Mary Travers loves Sam, who loves blond heartbreaker Pamela Forrest, who loves lawyer Stu Grant, who refuses to leave his wife Donna). The couplings he enjoys in this installment, however welcome, do nothing to clarify any of them. What lingers longest in this heartfelt valentine is Sam’s sweetly earnest outlook, which—like that of the town he loves—is not all that far from a child’s.