Kirby's Last Circus
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- $7.99
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- $7.99
Publisher Description
The author of the Chance Purdue series introduces a Chicago detective who goes under the big top to take down the ringmaster of a Russian conspiracy.
When the CIA chooses Birch Kirby, a mediocre detective with a personal life even less thrilling than his professional one, no one is more surprised by the selection than Birch himself. But the agency needs someone for a secret mission, and Birch may be just the clown for the job. Going undercover as a circus performer, he travels to Grizzly Gulch to investigate the source of daily, un-decodable secret messages that are being transmitted to the KGB. Birch interacts with wildly colorful characters while stumbling through performances as well as his assignment. With the clock ticking, Birch must hurry to take a right step toward bringing the curtain down on this very important case.
Praise for Ross H. Spencer’s The Dada Caper
“Parodies of the private‐eye novel come and go. Here is The Dada Caper by Ross H. Spencer. It has every cliché down pat, including rat-tat-tat writing in which paragraphs are seldom more than one sentence. . . . The hero is a private eye who is always tailing the wrong people and hitting the wrong guys. The Dada Caper is wild, shrewd, mad and unexpectedly funny.” —The New York Times
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Admired for Echoes of Zero and other mysteries, Spencer capitalizes on the outre in his ninth novel, with caricatures too broad even for farce. Playing the lead is Chicago private detective Birch Kirby, whose remarkable fumbling attracts intelligence "experts.'' They believe Kirby's stupidity is a cover for genius at espionage and persuade him to help the CIA. In a village called Grizzly Gulch, the detective is at the mercy of a septuagenarian sex maniac, owner of the No Sox baseball team, and other women who lust after him while he's trying to ferret out KGB agents. Every mistake of Kirby's is hailed as a triumph, and his greatest blunder clinches the hero's reputation. Working for Admiral Doldrum's Circus, Kirby is told to put a ``speck'' of power into a cannon but loads it with a ``peck'' that blows the human cannonball and the Soviet network into the stratosphere. The sexual antics, raw language and ridiculous players will appeal to readers who enjoy burlesque laid on with a trowel.
