Lucky Leonardo
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- $22.99
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- $22.99
Publisher Description
Leonardo Cook, practicing psychiatrist, is experiencing a delicate emotional phase. His wife has left him for another man, his patients are boring and he’s feeling somewhat guilty about his relationship with his girlfriend, a Starbucks employee half his age. And he may be on the verge of another nervous breakdown.
When Leonardo is called upon by a friend to talk a tech genius out of making public a secret new innovation—and the tech genius ends up jumping out of the window—Leonardo’s life takes flight on a roller-coaster of disaster.
Making a darkly hilarious debut, Jonathan Canter gleefully builds a small Massachusetts town filled with the interrelated lives of fantastically neurotic characters—and at their center, poor, “lucky” Leonardo. Fast-paced and laugh-out-loud funny, Lucky Leonardo is not to be missed.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Canter, an attorney and former Harvard Lampoon editor, makes a noteworthy, slightly overambitious debut with this modern-day tale of legal hijinks in a cloistered Massachusetts town. Leonardo Cook is a divorced middle-aged psychiatrist whose affair with a Starbucks barista half his age and endless appointments with patients suffering from boring, self-serving neuroses make up most of his troubles. That is, until William Brockleman, a lawyer acquaintance, hires him to talk a DeltaTek computer software designer, Eugene Binh, out of divulging corporate secrets. Negotiations fail (through no fault of our hero's) and the desperate Eugene, who has barricaded himself into his office, dives out of a seven-story window. Leonardo's usual concerns are thus bulldozed by a series of legal battles initiated by everyone from Brockleman and DeltaTek to the unsuccessfully suicidal Eugene and his money-hungry wife. In trying to put the situation into perspective, Leonardo's middling lawyer offers him this bit of advice: "In litigation," she says, "there's always unexpected twists and turns, like in a suspense thriller. You play it chapter by chapter." Torturing himself with replays of his ex-wife's infidelity, chasing after his runaway 13-year-old son and fielding the advances of multiple stalkers, Leonardo is always just shy of the next raging calamity. There are a few bumpy moments here, but Canter's in-it-for-the-ride narrative is comic and satisfying, accompanying dizziness and all.
