Eureka

Eureka

Eureka. It’s what you say when you strike gold. It’s also a town in California where the truth might be buried forever. In New York Times bestselling author William Diehl’s thrilling, accomplished new novel, the seamy past of America’s most glamorous state lies in this deceptively peaceful area, one hundred miles north of Los Angeles. It was the lawless place from which young, rugged Thomas Culhane escaped to fight World War I. Now it’s a place where, two decades later, police detective Zeke Bannon investigates a death that seems a sad accident. Until you look a bit closer. The year is 1941. Verna Wilensky has been electrocuted in her bathtub, leaving a lower-middle-class life, no survivors, and a bank account packed with almost a hundred thousand dollars. Mysterious checks have consistently come to her for more than twenty years, most drawn from a bank in San Pietro, a town once known as Eureka. Eureka was a town that used to be a bootlegger’s paradise and a gangster’s dream. Now it is the rebuilt metropolis where Sheriff Thomas Culhane is launching a bid to be the golden state’s next governor. But something just might threaten his ambitions. As Bannon digs deeper into Wilensky’s demise, he unearths a decades-old secret that starts in a shootout, builds to a bloodbath, and could end up within the upper echelons of California’s elite, forever changing the destiny of a state. Rich in historical detail, complex in its connection between past and present, and filled with the nonstop action that are the hallmarks of this modern master, Eureka is an epic achievement of storytelling and suspense–William Diehl’s most extraordinary novel yet. William Diehl clearly understands the three essentials of any bestselling 1940s-era crime thriller: gangsters, gunplay, and guilty secrets. But Eureka isn't just another noirish shoot-'em-up, as shallow and forgettable as a stoolie's grave. It's a combustible, epic-aspiring saga about long-ago violence and the limits of justice, about revenge and redemption and two rivalrous lawmen drawn together by common ideals. Most of the action centers around Zeke Bannon, a young L.A. cop whose probing into the murder of a mysterious widow--electrocuted in her own bathtub--leads him to the once-sinful town of Eureka, now called San Pietro. It's from there that she'd been receiving anonymous cashier's checks over the last two decades, money Bannon figures she earned by her silence. Was she helping to cover up the truth about a 1921 shootout that caused the death of Eureka's frontier-style sheriff? Nobody in modern San Pietro will talk, least of all Thomas "Brodie" Culhane, a World War I hero who cleaned up the town and is now running for governor of California. Torn between admiring Culhane and trying to link him to the widow's killing, Bannon ignites historical enmities that threaten to express both men to their graves. Although Diehl offers ample cinematic violence here, there's little true menace, and a romantic subplot involving Bannon with a gorgeous banker is neither credible nor effectively exploited. Still, Eureka is a polished work, full of careful character studies and drama, with a gasp-provoking solution that few readers will anticipate. --J. Kingston Pierce In sleepy little Eureka, CA, police detective Zeke Bannon discovers a dirty little secret that could do in his boss. Copyright 2001 Reed Business Information, Inc. It's 1945, and Zeke Bannon, injured in the war, wakes up in an L.A. hospital to find a visitor, his former LAPD partner, Ski Agassi. It seems that Ski, too old for the army, has been busy investigating an old case that ate away at Zeke before he left for Europe. Cut to the year 1900, and we're in Eureka, a corrupt shantytown north of San Francisco, replete with brothels, saloons, and hoodlums. Brodie Culhane, an Irish orphan, and Ben Gorman, Jewish and the son of the wealthiest man on the Hill, are teenagers and best friends. Mr. Gorman takes Brodie under his wing, for he sees promise in the young man. With an enticing back-and-forth storytelling method, Diehl slowly connects the two worlds, linking characters from Eureka to those who play roles in Zeke's prewar investigation. It turns out that Culhane made a name for himself during World War I and came back with dreams for making it big--until ghosts from his past interfered. Although Diehl fans may miss his popular protagonist, Chicago attorney Martin Vail, they surely won't be disappointed by this riveting multigenerational thriller, which seamlessly spans 40 years of American history and blends the Old West with postwar mystery and political intrigue. Mary Frances Wilkens Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved Eureka. It s what you say when you strike gold. It s also a town in California where the truth might be buried forever. In New York Times bestselling author William Diehl s thrilling, accomplished new novel, the seamy past of America s most glamorous state