Felonious Monk
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2.5 • 2 Ratings
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
Meet Tommy Martini, the monk with an anger management problem. Since killing somebody with a single punch is not a needed talent in a monastery, he spends his time praying, meditating, and taking his anger management medicine. But his meditations are interrupted by a legacy from his uncle, a crooked priest. Arriving in a New Age Arizona town to claim his inheritance, Brother Tommy meets a charismatic, smoking-hot cult leader who claims that women are being impregnated by alien beings while they sleep. Tommy’s own sleep is disturbed—by cartel hitmen, Mafia bill collectors, and women intrigued by his vow of chastity. He loses his anger management medicine in time to deal with the hitmen, but the women present an uphill battle.
William Kotzwinkle’s quicksilver touch has produced an effervescent piece of entertainment filled with suspense, turns you won’t see coming, and the humor for which he is famous.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Tommy Martini, the quick-tempered 26-year-old narrator of this nimble comic thriller from Kotzwinkle (The Fan Man), has spent five years in a Mexican monastery repenting the death of a young man he killed in a barroom fight during college. When word comes that Martini's retired parish priest uncle, Vittorio, is on his death bed, Martini pays the old man a final visit at his home outside Phoenix, Ariz. After Vittorio dies, his Mafia-connected relatives are surprised and dismayed to learn that he left his considerable assets to Martini. Unbeknownst to them, Vittorio recently facilitated the sale of a pair of churches to a business buying up church real estate and flipping it, while also running a money-laundering scheme for a Mexican cartel. According to the mob goons and cartel assassins who won't leave Martini alone, Vittorio stole from them, and they aim to collect. Amusing complications arise after Martini, who has taken a chastity vow, meets an attractive female cult leader, who claims aliens are impregnating women while they sleep. Fans of Donald Westlake's action-packed, screwball crime fiction will hope Martini will be back for an encore.
Customer Reviews
Crooked, No Chaser
The author is an American novelist, children’s writer and screenwriter best known (although not by me until I read his Wikipedia entry) for his novelisation of the screenplay of E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial (1982).
Tommy Martini, the protagonist, is the grandson of a mafia don and has anger management issues. After he kills a a guy in a fistfight, his grandpa sees to it he is not prosecuted and he goes to live in a monastery in Mexico, as you do. Five years there on regular medication straighten him out, sort of, until a local mother prevails upon him to stop her 13 year old son joining — read, getting press-ganged into — the local drug cartel. Our boy obliges with extreme prejudice (towards the recruiters, not the kid). The head honcho monk suggests he get out of Durango for a while. His uncle, who was a priest, has just croaked up in New Mexico so he goes there for the funeral and the family dispute over the Will. The priest uncle, who turns out to have been less than scrupulous in his business dealings, leaves everything to our boy. He embraces the things he had given up as a monk and has a series of (mis)adventures.
Hard-boiled fiction in a desert setting. The pacing is good, the characters stereotypical. Some wry humour but Mr K is no Carl Hiaasen or Elmore Leonard.