Bad News

Starred review from March 5, 2001
Westlake fans will welcome the return, after a five-year hiatus, of luckless burglar John Dortmunder and his gang of lowlifes from the back room of the O.J. Bar and Grill. In this, perhaps the best Dortmunder novel so far, Andy Kelp, Tiny Bulcher and the Murches (Stan and Mom) join Dortmunder in horning in on another crew's scam—cheating two Native American tribes out of one-third of the take from a lucrative Indian casino in upstate New York. Fitzroy Guilderpost, mastermind of the con (and a memorable Westlake creation one hopes to see again), has enlisted Little Feather Redcorn, a Las Vegas card dealer and showgirl, to pose as the last living member of an extinct tribe with a claim to the casino. Unknown to the schemers, the casino managers have been cooking their books and will go to any length to avoid sharing the wealth. As the foes switch dead Indians from grave to grave, seeking to prove or deny Little Feather's tribal membership, Dortmunder plots an impossible and hilarious robbery using a blizzard as an accessory, and comes up with the usual mixed results. Now that Westlake has resumed both the Dortmunder series and (writing as Richard Stark) the Parker novels, his fans again have a choice of the amusing, relatively benign capers of the Dortmunder clan and the cold crimes of the felonious Parker and his endless trail of bloody bodies and blown safes. This latest carries on the Dortmunder tradition and raises it to new standards. (Apr. 11)Forecast:With the June 1 release of the film of
What's the Worst That Could Happen?, which features Danny DeVito as the villain, MWA Grand Master and three-time Edgar winner Westlake seems headed for the kind of success his hapless hero can only dream of.

March 1, 2001
Dortmunder, the man on whom the sun shines only when darkness is what's needed, is back in his tenth comic caper (following 1996's What's the Worst That Could Happen?), and that's good news to his many fans. The original scam involves passing off ex-Vegas showgirl Little Feather Redcorn as the sole survivor of the Pottaknobbee tribe. It is extinct, but, if there were any living representative, said representative would be eligible to share one-third of the earnings of a successful Native American casino operation, and so Little Feather wants in on the action. Once Dortmunder blunders into the arrangement, though, a flurry of dug-up graves and changed headstones ensues (all with the aim of validating Little Feather's legitimacy). Beneath the thin veneer of timeliness offered by references to Native American casinos and DNA testing beats a timeless plot that combines the best elements of the Three Stooges and a Damon Runyon story. That should be good enough for anybody looking for a finely oiled and remarkably sex- and violence-free romp through the graveyards of upper New York State. For all public libraries. Bob Lunn, Kansas City P.L., MO

Copyright 2001 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

February 15, 2001
What should have been an easy $1,000 for a 10-minute, after-hours heist in a discount department store goes hilariously wrong, and it's all downhill from there. Short the anticipated grand, and somewhat shaken by the number of cops he must dupe in the department store, Dortmunder, Westlake's star-crossed professional thief, gets sucked into digging up a casket in a Queens cemetery and replacing it with another. "I'm a robber," he gripes. "Not a grave robber." That's one of Dortmunder's charms: he knows what he is. But the grave robbing is part of a clever scam to gain control of a third of a Native American casino in upstate New York, and Dortmunder and two cohorts find themselves in the unlikely position of being players in someone else's scheme. Which leads Dortmunder to some rare, existential angst. Vintage Westlake and vintage Dortmunder--clever, whimsical, charming, and above all, funny--" Bad News" is good news for Westlake's devoted fans. --" Thomas Gaughan"

(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2001, American Library Association.)