Bad News (John Dortmunder Series #10)

I'm a robber, John Dortmunder says, not a grave robber. Yet he soon finds himself in a Long Island cemetery with dirt up to his knees. His old friend Andy Kelp is to blame - Andy and the Internet. For it was while ambling on the Net that Kelp met up with master manipulator Fitzroy Guilderpost and his nefarious companions, the flunked teacher Irwin Gabel and the Las Vegas showgirl Little Feather Redcorn. What these three have in mind is the takeover of an upstate casino, and what they also envision is that Dortmunder and Kelp will not share in the ill-gotten gains. Shovel in hand, Dortmunder wonders whose grave this is. If he isn't careful, it could be his.

New York Times Book Review - Marilyn Stasio

Westlake has a genius for comic strategy, and the complications he devises when the casino operators initiate a counterplot to discredit Little Feather have a lunatic brilliance worthy of Abbott and Costello. But Westlake is also a card with characters, and he flashes that talent to terrific effect here with droll profiles of the vulpine lawyers, crooked casino operators, lying petitioners and outraged Indians who file before a beady-eyed judge with a distinct aversion for cases as ''excessively interesting'' as this one. They should all be so excessive.

DONALD E. WESTLAKE has written numerous novels over the past thirty-five years under his own name and pseudonyms, including Richard Stark. Many of his books have been made into movies, including , which became the brilliant film noir Point Blank, and the 1999 smash hit Payback. He penned the Hollywood scripts for The Stepfather and The Grifters, which was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Screenplay. The winner of three Edgar awards and a Mystery Writers of America Grand Master, Donald E. Westlake was presented with The Eye, the Private Eye Writers of America's Lifetime Achievement Award, at the Shamus Awards.