Customer Reviews

Trust Me on This

5 star:		(6)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

This was a very funny book. It had the usual Westlake shenanigans and completely outlandish behavior, but the twist is how the newspaper in the story is modeled after The National Inquirer. It made good fun of the "excessive news" industry and added a new concept: the body in the box. This is the holy grail of excessive news stories in this book. The protagonists try to take a picture of a dead famous person in his coffin. Absolutely hilarious! The female protagonist is naive and personable, very believable. The male lead is also believable as a cad who just wants stories that sell. I highly recommend this one to fans of Lawrence Block, Elmore Leonard, and Janet Evanovich (as well as Westlake fans).

This is one of my annual must-reads. I have read it every year since it first came out and I still laugh uproariously at it. Westlake is famous for his comedy capers and this is the best of the bunch.

If you're a Westlake fan, you'll really like this one. If you haven't tried him yet, you're in for a treat. Think about what a loony bin a tabloid like the National Enquirer must be like, and then multiply it by ten, throw in a murder and Westlake's as-always warped perspective, and you will be rolling on the floor. While this isn't great literature, I was literally gasping for breath as I kept cracking up.

-David S. Rose

TRUST ME ON THIS is one of those books I can read over and over again and not get bored with it. As a journalist, I appreciate the scenes at the tabloid, which are funny as hell. However, Westlake also does a great job blending in the mystery and romance aspects, and has created a believable and likeable character with the heroine, Sara. This is a must read. Trust me.

I've read about a half dozen Westlake books--including several Dortmunder capers. They're fun & a bit ironic. I like this book the best, however, even more than God Save the Mark: A Novel of Crime and Confusion which was quite good. This one is very unusual--providing humorous, though sometimes horrid, views of tabloid "journalism" at its worst. Interwoven with a newbie's introduction to this land of lies--and her reactions to it--is a mystery that almost gets lost in the shuffle. But not quite. The ending is superb, IMHO--though I did figure out the culprit. The author plays fair with the reader--dropping subtle hints here & there throughout the book. Some of the incidents are quite humorous--bordering on the absurd. The characters have a very wide range of points of view: for example--p. 60: "I never would have married him except my mother hated him" to p. 218: "He who has nothing to lose has already won"--from cynicism to the profound. This is one terrific mystery novel. Indeed, it's difficult to limit it to just that narrow genre. Bravo Mr. Westlake!

I love this book. I love the character of Sara, who's really too naive for her own good.
I love the Australians, who get their training on much grungier newspapers.
I love Phyllis, who may or may not be slumming among the Weekly Galaxy crowd.
I love that in a staff meeting argument over photos vs "artist's renderings", the editor tells someone to check with travel and see if a photographer put in for five light years expenses.
The only thing that I don't love is that this book is not yet available on kindle, and my paperbacks keep falling apart. I tracked down a signed first edition, but don't have the heart to read it to pieces. So I just keep buying paperbacks.
If you're a Westlake fan, this is not like the Dortmunder novels. Not a caper (not really, anyway.) novel. Not really a crime novel (depending on how you define crime. But this book details more crimes against humanity than thefts). It's not like, for example, "Brothers Keepers".
Still, excellent job.
Much better than its sequel.
I recommend this one. I don't really recommend "Baby Would I Lie", unless you just really REALLY miss the characters after you're done reading this one.
But if you like funny, and you like newspaper books, don't miss this one.

I've read almost all of Donald Westlake's novels and have enjoyed them all immensely--until this one. Always before the central figure has been someone I could relate to, sympathize with after a fashion, care about to some degre. Not so with this book. All of the charactershere are obnoxious, valueless people involved in the rotten business of supermarket tabloid journalism. It's supposed to be funny, but it isn't.

The book is made up of several rather separate parts with one thin thread going through the whole. A young woman reporter is hired by a sleazy publishing company and is soon like a pig in a barnyard wallow. She is involved in a phony 100th birthday party for twins in a nursing home. Then she is involved in tracking down the romances and wedding of a TV actor. And finally in the death of a country singer. Through it all she thinks about a dead body she found on her first day at work.

There is no lie too big to tell at Galaxy publishing. There is no employee too obnoxious, from the publisher in his office/elevator to the travel office person. There is no expense to be spared in digging up dirt, invading privacy, or inventing scandal. Again, it is all supposed to be funny, I suppose, but the stories hurt people for no real purpose.

I've read Westlake books about hot rock thefts, antique car thefts, even the theft of an entire bank complete with guards. Never before did I wince, because it was all obviously in fun. But this book wasn't in fun. It was just a book about people of deplorable scruples and really bad taste.

Tracking down the classic Westlake comic capers is quite difficult and expensive when you can find them. If you're going to go to the effort and expense of doing so I would actually recommend some of his others instead of Trust Me on This as they are a lot funnier and better books than this. Not that you'll dislike this novel or anything and if they ever get around to re-releasing this book and you can get it from your local library again or at a reasonable retail price I would definitely encourage you to do so. However you can't do these things at the moment and if you're paying a lot to track down and purchase a classic Westlake novel I'd go with some of the others which are undoubtedly masterpieces such as Smoke, The Spy in the Ointment, New York Dance (also published as Dancing Aztecs) to name but three of the many high quality comic capers out there.

In Trust Me on This Sara Joslyn over a year ago turned down a massive salary to move down to Florida as a graduate journalist for the Weekly Galaxy because she wanted to do serious journalism, but the paper she worked for has gone bankrupt and she has now decided with that experience under her belt it can't do any harm to check out the Galaxy and its large pay packet. One the way to the paper on her first day she passes a corpse with a bullet hole in his head in a car on the side of the road. After checking out the scene she ponders how lucky she is to have a fresh story to take to her editor on the first day. It's only when she gets to the Galaxy that she notices something a little odd about the place, the boss has his office in a lift (elevator), she gets told off by secretaries for walking across a room instead of following the "tracks" (black lines on the floor) in the carpet, and when she tells her editor of the man in the car he asks was he someone famous? When she replies she doesn't think so he berates her for wasting his time and gives her a ridiculous story on sex curing gallstones. Still in her first week, she forgets to take the security sticker out of her rental car and learns the hard way that thee Galaxy takes security seriously. She is forced to track down the car before she can return to work. At the rental place she puts two and two together and works out the murdered man must have been on his way to the Galaxy and since she never saw a car coming in the opposite direction, one of her colleagues must be the murderer. Still no one at the Galaxy is interested in this story and she can't seem to find a report of the murder in any other paper either.

Like I said if you can come across this in your library or buy it for a good price do so but if spending big money get the other comic capers first and also check out Westlake's greatest masterpiece The Ax as well!

A great story and an otherwise excellent reading was spoiled for me by the APPALLING "Australian" accents used for three of the characters. I certainly don't expect perfection, but this reader didn't get anywhere near.
These Australians sounded like Cockneys with some bizarre speech defect. A little more research to find out how Australians actually speak might have helped.
Send us up, by all means - the Aussie characters were hilariously written - but please try to at least approximate the accent.
If Kate Winslett and Meryl Streep can do it, so can you. (Okay, Meryl's character was a New Zealander living in Australia, but all the more admirable for that!)