Dead folks - Jon A Jackson

Hit-man Joe Service is back, after spending most of Deadman - the prequel to Dead Folks - in a coma. On the run once again from would-be mob assassins and suffering from partial memory loss, Joe enlists the aid of his love-struck nurse, the virginal Cate Yoder, as he searches for his long-time lover Helen Sedlacek and the millions of dollars they heisted from the mob.
When Joe surfaces in Salt Lake City Detective Sergeant 'Fang' Mulheisen, eager to finally get his man, is immediately on his tail. As the dead bodies mount up, Mulheisen is at the centre of the action, putting together the pieces of the puzzle, while Joe uses his unfailing craftiness to evade Mulheisen, the Detroit mob, a relentless hit-woman and an angry gang of Tongan giants.
In this high-spirited addition to Jackson's hard-nosed repertoire, Mulheisen's expertise and dead-on instincts lead him and Joe Service to a climactic ending that readers will not soon forget

Jon A. Jackson grew up in northern Michigan and now lives in the Montana Rockies. He is a devoted jazz fan, an avid angler and a carpenter. His Mulheisen novels have been translated into half a dozen European languages.

Tough prose, slick scene changes and terrific line-up of cool characters are all present and correct ... Add to this a gift for lending starling violence with the cruellest humour, and he can readily claim for himself a place among the aristocracy of hard-boiled US writers.
Herald

Jackson's Mulheisen chronicles have created something unique: a comic soap opera in which the murderously funny writing skewers the characters so surely that nobody can budge an inch, unless you count dying as movement.
Kirkus Reviews

Jackson makes the hard-boiled form look as if he thought it up himself last week ... Dead Folks offers both deep reader satisfaction and anticipation over the Mulheisen series.
Newsday

Dead Folks reads like an episode of The Fugitive written by a clever if slightly dishevelled Elmore Leonard ... Jackson's inventiveness never falters.
The Washinton Post