Oops!
-
- $4.99
-
- $4.99
Publisher Description
“You’re strutting along, maybe even enjoying tempting fate,
and then oops! you slip on a banana peel.” —Alo Nudger
It is impossible not to respond warmly and with affection to John Lutz's rather hapless private investigator, Alo Nudger. In this, his tenth attempt to make order in the chaos of the world around him, he is coerced by a very young, fearless, feckless pixie of a colleague named Lacy Tumulty to take over a case that she's too busy to handle. It's an easy assignment, but Nudger's agreement to help with the case is a reluctant one. Lacy, charming as she is, has a way of being followed by trouble.
The client is a man who wants to prove his daughter was murdered. The police won't do it, so he has hired Lacy, who enlists Nudger. The daughter, alone in her locked house, tripped on the stairs, fell, fractured her skull, and died. Seems to Nudger it's almost robbery to take the man's money.
But all is not what it seems. Lacy is beaten by an unknown assailant and devilishly crippled by the severing of an Achilles tendon. Even the delightful Claudia Bettencourt, to whom Nudger is "not married, but attached," becomes imperiled. But however much trouble this new adventure causes for Nudger and his friends, Lutz sees to it, as he has in his hero's previous escapades, that we readers profit mightily from the enjoyment this likable detective brings us.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
"Certainly he was in a romantic business--viewed from the outside," thinks Lutz's low-key, low-rent St. Louis PI, Alo Nudger, early in his 10th outing (after 1995's Death by Jury). "Writers like Chandler, Hammett and Parker had made sure of that." At first, Nudger's self-effacement is charming, and his honesty about both the real danger and the high drudgery quotient in his line of work refreshing. But after the fourth or fifth mention of Nudger's nervous stomach, and one too many appearances by the donut shop proprietor who guards the PI's office, even the most devoted Nudger fans might wish for a touch of romance. In need of the money, Nudger agrees reluctantly to help Lacy Tumulty, a female colleague who says she lusts for his body, investigate the case of a young woman dead from a fall down the stairs in her locked home. Nudger finds that his interest and sense of honor are engaged after Lacy is badly beaten and other people connected to the dead woman suffer fatal accidents. Calling on his detection skills and a friendship with a local cop whose patience bends credulity, Nudger uncovers the parties responsible for the crimes. But by that time, the wispy pleasures of Lutz's chronic underachiever have mostly drifted out of sight.
