Unknown Man No. 89
By Elmore Leonard
What is the
life of a
process server in a country like the United States of America of late seventies? Moreover when this process server would have to do this high-risk
job with a gun on his body. Worse still, this process server doesn’t take shit from anybody. He has anger problem sort of. This legal process server has had his hands on a lot of things while trying to find his feet in life.
Ryan is a thirty-six year old man that thinks he is a misfit and a little out of touch with reality that he sees nine-to-five employees as right while he is wrong. He never could fit into any particular job for long to establish him as a force to reckon with. Ryan lasted on an insurance job for three weeks. He had sold cars in different places in Detroit but never got along with either the sales manager or the owner. He had equally worked as a construction worker and driven a truck and worked at Abercrombie’s store in Troy and left unceremoniously because he was everything but polite to the customers. Ryan’s ambition, up until he was twenty was to be a major league third baseman but he could not because of his poor sight. He practically grew up on the street where he learnt that in street fighting if there was no way to get out of it, you hit first and make it count and usually it was over.
When he secured the job of a process server, he decided he liked the job even to his surprise though the job offered him the joy of being his own boss. Besides the fact that he has a knack for finding
people, the job is well enough to pay his bills. Initially, he refused to carry a gun while on the job but when he figured out the job of process serving is a dangerous occupation he had a change of mind.
This suspense filled novel explores what big
money can cause people do. It makes them do dangerous things, make them lie, cheat and kill. Worse still, when a once poor hustler like Ryan is contracted as a private detective by a shady character to go find the address of a murderer who is either fifty-five or sixty-five for three hundred dollars and ten percent of the booty. He dispassionately went after accomplishing this seemingly easy task. But what he found out when he dug further was different from what he was told by the friend who came to him for help. This shady hard boiled character Ryan was asked to figure out his residential address happened to be a psychiatrically disabled army officer who was drafted and sent to Vietnam and there suffered nervous breakdown during a mortar barrage which eventually led to psychiatric disorders while in service in Japan. Robert Leary Jr. was discharged and he returned to Detroit to hide behind his psychiatric problems to kill people and rob a bank, cheating his friends out of money.
Now, a friend who got the job of locating Leary from one Mr. Perez a former jailbird who served his term in Africa met Ryan. This Mr. Perez calls himself an investment consultant. He sold the story that Leary has large amount of shares and unclaimed dividends passed to him by his late father which he is not aware of and therefore, he must be located and tracked down so that he will sign certain agreement with Perez before certain percentage of the shares and money are giving to the rightful owner. These shares he said came from companies that survived the great depression.
When Ryan dug deeper, he discovered to his chagrin that there are more about Leary and Perez than meets the eye. There are other bad characters after the life of Leary who want one or two scores to settle with him. This sets off the suspense that never stops in the book.
Pick the book and you’ll agree with me its worth your time.
More reviews about the Unknown Man No 89