The Fall-Down Artist

"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.