True Crime

1934 Chicago dazzles with fast action and calculating, cold-blooded mean ness as private detective Nate Heller combs Chicago's North Side looking for John Dillinger. But things take a turn for the strange when self-aggrandizing G-Man Melvin Purvis shoots down a Dillinger double in front of the Biograph Theater.Full of muscle and oozing Chicago's tough-guy persona to the hilt, Max Allan Collins' Nate Heller is the ultimate private investigator-in the ultimate P.I. town. Heller's undercover search for a farmer's-daughter-turned-gun-moll has him on the dusty Depression backroads of middle America, in the company of Ma Barker and her boys, Baby Face Nelson, Alvin Karpis, and a very-much-still-alive Dillinger-whose outlandish plan to kidnap J. Edgar Hoover in downtown Chicago is one Heller tries to foil. Including appearances by fan dancer Sally Rand, boxer Barney Ross, and Heller's &quote;godfather,&quote; Frank Nitti, True Crime is a relentless classic.