It features a version of Kinky Friedman himself in a sort of modern pastiche of hard-boiled detective fiction of the 30s and 40s, with added comic dialogue and Kinky’s musings, conversations (one way) with his cat and so on. It begins in the classic way with a cool, beautiful blonde coming to Kinky’s agency asking him to find her husband. It then gets progressively more strange and frankly bonkers as odd events happen, people try to kill him (or do they?) and a possible trail to a man called Leaning Jesus and thence to Al Capone begins to emerge. It’s pretty crazy, but it does hang together and I became rather involved with the story.
It does start pretty slowly and rather clumsily, I thought, but it picked up very nicely. There’s a good balance of plot, action and Kinky’s reflections on all manner of things, which are amusing, often shrewd and deceptively erudite in places. I thought it was great fun and I’ll certainly be trying more in the series. Be prepared for a slightly stodgy start, but I can recommend this as a very entertaining read.
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