Up In Honey's Room
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- £3.99
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- £3.99
Publisher Description
'America's greatest crime writer' (Newsweek) brings his genius for characterisation, his rich ear for dialogue, and his piercing psychological insight to a gripping story set in an era he's never before explored: the years of the Second World War.
The odd thing about Walter Schoen is he's a dead ringer for Heinrich Himmler. Walter is a member of a spy ring that sends US war production data to Germany and gives shelter to escaped German prisoners of war.
Honey Deal, Walter's American wife, has given up trying to make him over as a regular guy. She decides it's time to stop telling him jokes he doesn't understand and get a divorce.
Along comes Carl Webster, the Hot Kid of the Marshals Service, looking for an escaped POW. Carl uses Honey to meet Walter, who Carl believes is hiding the POW. Honey's a free spirit; she likes the hot kid marshal and doesn't care much that he's married. But all Carl wants is to do his job without getting shot...
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Set in the waning days of WWII, bestseller Leonard's disappointing 40th novel finds gunslinging U.S. marshal Carl Webster, introduced in 2005's The Hot Kid, on the trail of Jurgen Schrenk and Otto Penzler, German POWs escaped from their Okmulgee, Okla., detention camp. The pair wind up in Detroit in the care of Walter Schoen, a butcher and Himmler look-alike, with whose ex-wife, wisecracking bottle-blonde Honey Deal, Carl soon finds himself smitten. While married Carl contemplates breaking his marriage vows (Honey does anything but dissuade him), Otto disappears and a dysfunctional German spy ring led by hard-drinking Vera Mezwa and her cross-dressing manservant, Bohdan cozies up with Jurgen. Vera and Bohdan, meanwhile, are secretly planning to disappear, but Bohdan wants to put in the ground anyone who could later give them up to the Feds. Leonard's writing line by line is as sharp as ever, but the plotting is uncharacteristically clunky and the pacing is stuck in low gear. Leonard has written a lot of great books, but this isn't one of them.