A search for a vanished husband proves one of Amos Walker’s strangest cases yet.

What could be more innocent than watching old movies? For Neil Catalin, a wealthy man with a happy home, old-fashioned pictures were a hobby that became an obsession. But he wasn’t watching The Wizard of Oz. Crime movies were his passion, the sort where life is cheap and death is free, and Catalin sank himself into them as an escape from the stresses of suburbia, when soaring debt threatened to overwhelm the life he had created.

Now he has disappeared, and his wife believes the clue may be in his collection of gruesome classics. She calls on Amos Walker, who ventures into a black-and-white past in his hunt for the missing man. The journey is far from escapism, because this is Detroit, where the guns don’t fire blanks.