Synopsis
Joe Crow has hit rock bottom. First, he misplaces his girlfriend overseas and can't even find her phone number. Then, he loses his nest egg in Las Vegas. And to top it all off, he burns out his Jaguar and ends up in a screaming yellow Pontiac GTO, feeling not at all like the man he wants to be. This is all dismaying enough to make Joe think about giving up the gambling life. Joe had gotten on the bad side of his father's best friend, Axel Speeter. This happened when he unwittingly introduced Axel's almost-daughter, Carmen Roman, to Hyatt Hilton, a one-time coke dealer who claims to be walking the straight and narrow these days. Axel, who's always been suspicious of Hyatt, makes it clear that Joe had better make sure that Hy the Guy is on the level before anyone walks down the aisle. Crow's closer look at Hyatt shoves him into the middle of a dispute between Hilton and the self-styled we'll-never-die cult Hilton helped to found. They call themselves the Amaranthines, and they seem willing to do anything to extend their life spans - including planting Joe Crow in a Dumpster.
Publishers Weekly
In relating this violent, very Midwestern comedy of errors, Hautman (Mortal Nuts) adopts a deadpan tone that has a few too many flat moments. The trouble begins when Alex Speeter, putative stepfather of Carmen Roman, asks out-of-work poker shark Joe Crow to check out Carmen's fianc, Hyatt Hilton. (Hautman names his charactersamong them Flowrean Peeche, "properly pronounced `Puh-shay'"like a stoned, Pynchon-reading Garrison Keillor.) Joe asks around about Hilton, a distributor of fake Evian water and co-founder of the very for-profit Amaranthine Church of One, and discovers that he's planning a spectacular putsch against the church's current leaders, Rupert Chandra and Polyhymnia Desimmone. Hilton's goofy plan is kept secret through most of the book; it turns out to be a pip and goes, of course, amazingly awry. Despite subplots involving plenty of Twin Cities eccentrics (Joe's semi-estranged hipster girlfriend, Laura Debrowski; steroid-crazed homicidal bodybuilder Beaut (n Leslie) Miller; and Joe's smitten admirer, race-changing Flowrean), the novel's cartoon violence and rather nasty ending steers Hautman out of Wobegon territory into a universe that might have been cooked up by the Coen brothers. Author tour. (Oct.)