Stuff to Die For

September 3, 2007
Set in South Florida, this middling thriller from Bruns (Barbados Heat) never quite manages to persuade the reader to buy into its concept. Best friends Skip Moore and James Lessor have partnered in various hare-brained schemes since grade school, but their latest lands them in the midst of murder and international intrigue. After Lessor gets Moore to join him in a moving business, the pair are hired by an attractive divorcee, Jackie Fuentes, to haul away the possessions her ex-husband, Rick, left behind. That routine assignment turns into something quite different when they accidentally open one of Rick's letters and find a severed finger inside, a discovery that enmeshes them in a plot by Cuban exiles to topple Castro. A prose style that falls short of the standard set by such chroniclers of the Florida crime scene as Carl Hiaasen and Tim Dorsey fails to compensate for a plot that on the improbabilities.

August 1, 2007
On their first job as self-employed movers, twenty-something James Lessor and Skip Moore discover a bloody finger. Throw in the CIA, murderous thugs, Cubans with agendas, and Miami will never be the sameand neither will James and Skip. This quirkly engaging mystery by the author of the "Mick Sever" series ("South Beach Shakedown") is a buddy novel as funny as the movie "Dumb and Dumber".

Copyright 2007 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from August 1, 2007
On Floridas lower east coast, only one thing flourishes more luxuriantly than crime, and that is crime writing. With Bruns second offering, we are presented with yet another set of lovable freaks and oddballs; this batch will remind the reader of Tim Dorseys cast of whacked-out characters but with the narrative voice and feel of Mark Twains Huck Finn. The protagonist, Skip (aka Eugene), and his high-school pal James work dead-end jobs in one of Miamis deadest ends, Carol City. When James comes into a windfall, the friends devise a business plan over late-night beers, buy a one-ton box truck, and go into the freelance hauling business. Their first job, arranged for by Skips millionaire girlfriend, yields up a finger on which rests their high-school class ring. The plot involves the staples of South Florida fiction: anti-Castro elements and involvement by possible sinister government agencies. But the fun is in the characters. When Skips girlfriend of many years informs him she is pregnant, he says in dead earnestness, Whos the father? Later, when Skip tells James the good news, he retorts, equally seriously, Whos the father? How can you not like a novel with characters like that?(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2007, American Library Association.)