From Publishers Weekly
The irrepressible, hysterically funny Friedman sounds an uncharacteristic melancholy note in his 15th novel featuring a quasi-fictional version of the former country-western singer himself as an amateur detective. While his earlier books (Greenwich Killing Time, etc.) contained serious insights into human nature, they were mostly notable for Friedman's engaging personaâ€"cynical, humorous, free-associating and often politically incorrect. Here Friedman is hospitalized with malaria, suffering the bumbling efforts of his motley Village Irregulars to nurse him back to health. His delirium and disorientation lead him to doubt his senses when a chance glance out his window shows a woman being physically abused in an adjacent apartment on a floor that later proves to contain no apartments, in an obvious nod to Hitchcock's Rear Window. Fortunately, one of his many friends, a private investigator, gives him the benefit of the doubt and looks into the case. Still, Friedman must play a passive role, and feels even more out of touch when his PI friend does his preliminary digging on the Internet. While the punchy, acerbic writing will be familiar and pleasurable to Friedman fans, this remains an atypical effort that hopefully will be followed by a return to a less downbeat plot.
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Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
From Booklist
In the sixteenth cracked caper for Friedman's eponymous sleuth, the Kinkster is laid low by latent malaria from his Peace Corps days; while enduring the casual ministrations of his rat pack, he seems to witness a woman being beaten in the adjacent building--or was it just a fever dream? Shades of Rear Window? Well, not quite. For the uninitiated, this series is rather like what might result if some hallucinogenic muse influenced Tom Robbins to pen mysteries; this time around, though, the loopy tone and gonzo yuks fail to compensate for a listless and repetitive tale that takes as its crux the rather irrelevant question of our hero's sanity. There are some delightful episodes of delirium amid the ubiquitous cat turds, but even die-hard fans will scud through these horse latitudes in hopes of more diverting antics ahead; while waiting, they might try Christopher Brookmyre, Tim Sandlin, or Jerome Charyn's Isaac Sidel series. David Wright
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
