Customer Reviews

High Jinx (Mohonk Mysteries)

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If you're paying a lot of money to track down and purchase classic Westlake books I'd get something else. This is not a comic caper or anything close to masterpiece novel status like Smoke, The Spy in the Ointment, New York Dance (also published as Dancing Aztecs) to name but three of the many high quality old Westlake novels out there.

What High Jinx is, is a putting into print version of one of the programs of a successful hotel (Mohonk Mountain House) mystery role playing weekend run by Donald E Westlake and his wife Abby. The book provides an intro into the Mohonk hotel, the popularity of this weekend and boasts how it is always booked solid and has repeat visitation, has attracted guests such as top authors Stephen King, David Morrell and the like and gives other information along this line. A narration starts of this murder and the following chapters are speeches given from all the characters telling you how they came to be at Hotel Kluckkuckuhr in Switzerland in 1938. Some are spies, some are refugees who have escaped Nazi Germany, some are business men, some are old, some are young, some own the hotel, most know at least one other character and some have even confessed to the murder you the reader must solve. There's also a few photographs of the weekend and one of each of the characters (although this is a 1987 published book and the quality of photographs in print is not anything like what it is today). The book is also fairly short, you'll finish it in an hour, two if you take your time. You also don't want to have to put this down before you finish it as you sort of need to remember everything to solve the murder (which isn't that hard either I might add). If solving mysteries is your thing then by all means invest in this book but if just after a normal read I'd get one of Westlake's classic novels or even one of his modern day masterpieces such as The Ax, or the The Hook instead.