Eleven months into Macklin's marriage to Laurie, a bright, breathtaking blond nurse less than half his age, the pair are visiting northern Ohio, looking to purchase her late grandparents's 80-acre farm, "where she’d spent all her summers as a girl." Planting fresh roots outside the Motor City is one more vital step along Macklin's reform path; but peace will be harder to find than he'd hoped. His domineering, vain, and resentfully divorced new mother-in-law, Pamela Ziegenthaler, is suspicious of men, in general, but especially of Peter Macklin. She doesn't swallow his cover story about being a financially secure former camera retailer. At the same time, this ex-killer is leery of Pamela's latest beau, Canadian-born Benjamin Grinnell, and with good reason: "polite and boring" Grinnell is a "case man" working for round-the-bend Toledo mobster Joe Vulpo and his cross-dressing son, "Terrible" Tommy. He reconnoiters video-rental stores, in advance of their being knocked over by a gang of younger, dissolute thieves led by wannabe gunfighter "Wild Bill" Berman. But a recent slipup has forced these crooks to find new targets--the first of which will be the chain bookstore that Macklin's mother-in-law manages. So how does Macklin protect the two new women in his life without scaring them both to death, or lying to Laurie about his intentions--something he's promised never to do again? And how does he bring down Grinnell without attracting the unwanted attentions of "Reverend" Edgar Prine, the chauvinistic but straight-arrow commander of an Ohio State Police robbery task force, committed to corralling the video-store bandits?
Estleman goes lighter on the wisecracks here than in his Shamus Award-winning Amos Walker PI series (Retro), though he finds some obvious delight in spinning out the idiosyncratic backgrounds of both criminals and lawmen. As compensation, this Detroit-area author gives his previously lonely, anti-hero protagonist a sexy, adult, and intriguing relationship with the curvilinear Laurie, one that could excite a few jealous bones even in the comfortably lone-wolf Amos. A high-caliber denouement and a staggering turning-point finale make Little Black Dress just the right fit for the season. --J. Kingston Pierce