Synopsis
After his successful debut in Buzz Monkey, Top Kiernan is back. Only life in Athens, Georgia has grown more complicated. His former office manager (and ex-lover) has stolen half his clients and set up shop on her own. Top's no longer banking big bucks as an operative for Shaw’s Mercantile Marine, which has found his addiction to the adrenaline buzz a dangerous risk. He's six months behind in mortgage payments, and Fourth Federal is set to foreclose. So, for all his objections—the job’s too small, the client’s a racist—has no choice, really. He needs the twenty thousand. All he has to do is recover a Confederate battle flag—the one that stanched General “Stonewall” Jackson’s wounds when he was fatally shot on May 2, 1863, and in that instant became an American relic of incalculable value. Top’s search for the flag takes him and his friends on a raucous jaunt from Athens to the mansion of a multimillionaire stripper-turned-car-dealer to an armed compound in the Okefenokee Swamp to a tattoo convention. In between, they outwit and outrun obsessive collectors, bikers, ATF agents, the KKK, and more. It’s not exactly the way to beat an adrenaline habit.
Publishers Weekly
The hardest thing about loading your first mystery with all sorts of tricks, treats and relatively original concepts is what to do for an encore. Following his delightful debut, Buzz Monkey (2003), which introduced adrenaline junkie/international mercenary/arcane-quotation expert Tip Kiernan, Hill hits this wall hard in the sequel. There are some alluring leftovers: Tip can still tell us that "In the country of the blind, the one-eyed man is king" didn't come from either Abraham Lincoln or the Bible (it was the 16th-century Dutch philosopher Erasmus) and then, minutes later, take down a crew of three thugs hired to send a message. But almost perversely, Hill turns everything that was great fun in Buzz Monkey into a downer. Among other problems, Tip's quotation-checking business, Polymath, is failing after his partner/lover runs off with the company's money and clients. Somehow, the prospect of earning 20 grand for recovering a famous Confederate flag (the one used to staunch the blood of dying General Stonewall Jackson) doesn't get either Tip or the reader really excited: it's just a job, even if the outcome does involve what the book's promotional copy calls "a raucous jaunt" with some zany cohorts-all of whom had a much better time in Hill's first book. Agent, Philip Spitzer. (Oct. 10) Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.