Books.org participates in affiliate programs including Bookshop.org and the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program. We may earn a commission from qualifying purchases made through links on this page, at no additional cost to you.
Synopsis
The Edgar Award-nominated author of Gun Monkeys delivers an adrenaline rush of a novel that features a special appearance by Joe DiMaggio.
The high spot of Teddy Folger's life was the day in 1954 that he got an autographed baseball card from Joe DiMaggio himself. It's been downhill ever since. Which is why he just unloaded his freeloading wife and torched his own comic-book store–in one of the stupidest insurance scams in history. Enter Conner Samson. The down-on-his-luck repo man has just been hired to repossess Teddy's boat. Little does he know there's a baseball card on board that some men are willing to kill for. Thus begins a rip-roaring cross-country odyssey–and with bodies piling up, the squeeze is on for the penultimate piece of Americana. And Conner will be lucky if he ends up back where he started: broke and (still) breathing.
Publishers Weekly
The idea of the repo man as crime solver has been popular since Joe Gores's San Francisco series; Bill Eidson is a recent convert. Now Gischler, who earned an Edgar nomination for his debut, Gun Monkeys (2003), gets in on the act with his third novel, which features a down-at-the-heels repo man, Conner Samson, who's hired to take back a sloop, the Electric Jenny, from its defaulting owner, Teddy Folger. Folger has burned down his comic book and baseball card store in Pensacola, Fla., for the insurance, and now plans to sail away from his old life and wife on the craft. But what Conner soon discovers is that an almost priceless treasure, a baseball card signed in 1954 by both Joe DiMaggio and Marilyn Monroe, is hidden on the Jenny and that a Japanese collector with a team of deadly ninjas will kill anyone who gets in the way of his acquiring it. Gischler is a light and clever satirist who knows how to keep a narrative moving, and Conner, who has connections to the Southern art world and a foxy married ladyfriend named Tyranny Jones, is a character well worth another visit. Agent, Noah Lukeman at Lukeman Literary Management. (Apr. 5) Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.