Chicago Soft-Sho

Set in the mid-1990s, Chicago Soft-Shoe is a quirky crime novel, populated with off-beat characters, including the protagonist, Doc Madden. Doc, a former petty crook and Gulf War veteran, sells black velvet paintings, while dreaming of escaping to Yucatan, land of the Maya and second chances. His dreams are put on hold when Chicago's famed "Pharaoh of the Fixers" dies, and Doc is trapped in a power struggle and forced back into the world of crime in order to pay off a five thousand dollar debt to Eddie Rafferty, a notorious West Side fixer.;A Jimmy Cagney wannabe, Eddie Rafferty sets a con game into motion. He bets he can out-maneuver Leopold McBride, his longtime rival, in a series of "fixed" baseball games between the Chicago Cubs and St. Louis Cardinals. Knowing McBride to be a superstitious man, Rafferty concocts a bizarre con to undermine him, including progaganda posters from the dead. The day of the big fix, Rafferty takes a page out of the crime book of "Machine Gun" Jack McGurn, the mobster who masterminded the St. Valentine's Day Massacre. He has Doc masquerade as a Chicago cop and steal McBride's cocker spaniel and replace it with a squirrel monkey, one like the Pharaoh was so fond of. Doc is also ordered to shoot the dog and provide Eddie Rafferty with proof the deed has been done.;Leopold McBride is a small-time fixer who owns a cocker spaniel he always keeps muzzled. In 1989, McBride betrayed Doc in a cocaine deal. This resulted in Doc doing a two-year stint in the army and his wife divorcing him after he returned from the Gulf War. Knowing the time is ripe for revenge, Doc decides to not only comply with Rafferty's orders and steal McBride's dog, but with a little improvisational sleight-of-hand, undermine McBride's entire gambling operation as well.;As the power struggle reaches its boiling point, Doc's older brother is drawn into Rafferty's con, and is threatened with a battery acid martini unless he pays the ten grand Rafferty accuses him of losing in a bogus bet. Doc's sweetheart's brother is murdered by one of Rafferty's hired hands--a Star Trek, crystal meth junkie who decides to freelance his way to the top. Meanwhile, the Pharaoh's nephew is the victim of a hit and run. Laid up in a full body cast, he hires a troubleshooter who offers a reward for information leading to the name of the driver.;It's this quirky and increasingly obsessive set of schemes, along with plot twists involving Doc's discovery of who ran over the Pharaoh's nephew, as well as a situation of extreme jeopardy out of which Doc must squirm, that propels the book toward its climax as Doc concocts his own con to get even with Eddie Rafferty and Leopold McBride, the two men who have caused him misery most of his life.