Description:

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.