"A fall-down artist" is a person who collects insurance as compensation for a fictitious injury. Investigator Carroll Dorsey has become a specialist in such cases, working for lawyers and insurance companies to separate the honest from the frauds. What he begins to find is not individual chicanery, but an elaborate and sinister pattern. Dorsey works out of his home city of Pittsburgh, traveling to the depressed steel mill towns of the Allegheny/Monogehela Valley. Unemployment has bred desperation and anger among the hard men who worked the mills when the Pittsburgh area was the steel center of the country. The mills have just about closed down, but the complex network that is woven through an industrial society still exists. Dorsey's dogged efforts to uncover evidence of the fraud sparks opposition from all sides. There are suspicious union officials, unscrupulous lawyers, a doctor of questionable ethics, high-up city politicians, and possibly some individuals in the insurance company itself. Among the rank-and-file steelworkers are a few whose reactions are more basic - reactions that do not hesitate at murder. Dorsey refuses to be deflected from his purpose, even when his lover Gretchen withdraws from him because she cannot take the threats to his life that he ignores. He turns down what amounts to a bribe from his powerful politico father; he takes on more than his share of guilt for the murder of a retarded man he has befriended; he won't be stopped by the insurance executive to whom he reports. Thomas Lipinski knows Pittsburgh and the mill towns around it, and brings the reader the vivid atmosphere of this working-class side of America as few authors have succeeded in doing. The people are real, the setting is real, and the suspense, based in the desperate measures of desperate people, is riveting.

The Fall-Down Artist

Literature & Fiction

Lipinski, Thomas

United States

St Martins Pr

Down-on-his-luck private eye Carroll Dorsey searches for a missing girl, a quest that leads him into a blue-color neighborhood, a seedy drug underground, and an encounter with a beautiful state cop

A Picture of Her Tombstone

Minotaur Books

With his life in shambles, P.I. Carroll Dorsey is only to happy to take on a seemingly routine case of locating a woman's granddaughter, but nothing is what it seems as he spirals into a world of corrupt doctors, power-hungry cops, and his own dark secrets. Reprint.

A Picture of Her Tombstone: A Carroll Dorsey Mystery

Mystery, Thriller & Suspense

Mystery

Avon/Books

Insurance fraud investigation--trying to outsmart liars and cheats looking for a fast buck by scamming the system--may not be very glamorous, but these days in Pittsburgh, it's food on the table for P. 1. Carroll Dorsey. And with the economy headed south, fake fall-downs have turned into something of a working-class growth industry. Thing is, though, the more Dorsey looks, the more he sees. This phony-injury epidemic is bigger than it seems, and it might involve some of the heaviest hitters in town. If Dorsey makes the wrong move, he's liable to take the big fall-down himself and he's got no insurance. . .

Fall-Down Artist

Genre Fiction

AVON.

When a parish priest is accused of killing the husband of the woman with whom he had been having an affair, Pittsburgh private detective Carroll Dorsey takes on a vindictive former nun and vengeful D.A. Douglas Turner as he tries to find the real murderer. Original.

Steel City Confessions

Contemporary

Twilight

CENTER&gt; Sins of the Father Pittsburgh is a stew of ethnic divisions and, for some, a heritage of crime, punishment, and revenge. This is the legacy left to Carroll Dorsey, the son of a powerful political boss who is on his deathbed. Now a P.I. working the same streets where he once played as a boy, Dorsey is determined to look forward and not back as he makes a living in the city he's always called home.
 But nothing is as it seems when Dorsey is retained by an old gentlemanly Jewish gangster to search for the man's long-lost lover. As Dorsey traces the life, times, and disappearance of a magnificent woman with a Lena Horne smile, he finds himself immersed in the most agonizing case of his career. For as he winds his way through broken families, broken neighborhoods, and broken promises, to the scene of a horrifying triple homicide, Dorsey is forced to confront a crime carried out fifty years ago--one that reaches far too close to home...Pittsburgh is a stew of ethnic divisions and, for some, a heritage of crime, punishment, and revenge. This is the legacy left to Carroll Dorsey, the son of a powerful political boss who is on his deathbed. Now a P.I. working the same streets where he once played as a boy, Dorsey is determined to look forward and not back as he makes a living in the city he's always called home.
But nothing is as it seems when Dorsey is retained by an old gentlemanly Jewish gangster to search for the man's long-lost lover. As Dorsey traces the life, times, and disappearance of a magnificent woman with a Lena Horne smile, he finds himself immersed in the most agonizing case of his career. For as he winds his way through broken families, broken neighborhoods, and broken promises, to the scene of a horrifying triple homicide, Dorsey is forced to confront a crime carried out fifty years ago---one that reaches far too close to home...Pittsburgh is a stew of ethnic divisions and, for some, a heritage of crime, punishment, and revenge. This is the legacy left to Carroll Dorsey, the son of a powerful political boss who is on his deathbed. Now a P.I. working the same streets where he once played as a boy, Dorsey is determined to look forward and not back as he makes a living in the city he's always called home.
But nothing is as it seems when Dorsey is retained by an old gentlemanly Jewish gangster to search for the man's long-lost lover. As Dorsey traces the life, times, and disappearance of a magnificent woman with a Lena Horne smile, he finds himself immersed in the most agonizing case of his career. For as he winds his way through broken families, broken neighborhoods, and broken promises, to the scene of a horrifying triple homicide, Dorsey is forced to confront a crime carried out fifty years ago---one that reaches far too close to home...

Death in the Steel City

While Pittsburgh private detective Carroll Dorsey may have never followed in his deceased father's footsteps, the elder Dorsey's political connections and backroom deals left behind an unshakable legacy. When Ed Shearing, one of his father's closest political allies, asks Dorsey to travel to Chicago with him to witness the opening of a mysterious safety deposit box, Dorsey gets involved in a missing persons case rooted in the 1968 Democratic convention, civil unrest, political corruption, and the kind of greed that ruins families...and perhaps his life. "Lipinski excels at creating memorable Characters." -- Pittsburgh Tribune-Review "Lipinski does everything right." -- The Drood Review of Mystery "Carroll Dorsey's the genuine article and so is his world." -- The Drood Review of Mystery Tom Lipinski is the Shamus Award-winning creator of the Carroll Dorsey mystery series. He holds an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Pittsburgh and an MA in Literature from Slippery Rock University. Tom is presently a tenured professor of English at Edinboro University of Pennsylvania, where he served as Department Chair for eight years. He has also worked as an insurance investigator and as a corrections administrator.

Old Guys Rules

Independently published

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Lipinski, Thomas. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Lipinski, Thomas