Tony Just
Created by Eugene Izzi

TONY JUST is an ex-con AND an ex-cop, having served eleven years for the murder of a pimp who dealt in children. Now he's out on the streets, a free man, working as an unlicensed private detective in Chicago and sometimes thug, still trying to come to terms with the vast chasm between justice and the law.

Alas, this book, and all of Izzi's work, in fact, will be overshadowed by the Chicago author's bizarre, publicity-stunt suicide by hanging (or murder, if you're a conspiracy buff) in 1996.

"Too bad, too," says Joe Lofgreen, of Joe's Detective Pages. "Because we lost a great crime writer. Izzi's characters breathed with a vividness matched only in contemporary crime fiction by, perhaps, Elmore Leonard. But resounding with a street-level grittiness that Leonard can only mimic. (And) one of his grittiest and most engrossing novels was Tony's Justice... a tough, explosive, thoroughly involving thriller."

NOVELS

• Tony's Justice (1993) ...Buy this book