Smoke

October 2, 1995
Yet another variation on the invisible-man notion doesn't sound like a promising prospect, but if any author can wring some fresh fun out of it, Westlake's the one. He doesn't fail. Freddie Noon is a sharp, likable burglar whose mistake is to break into the offices of two doctors doing so-called research for the Tobacco Institute. Catching him, they make him a human guinea pig for one of their formulas, and--meet disappearing Freddie. Naturally, his life as a burglar gets much easier, but his girlfriend, Peg, isn't too comfortable with an invisible lover. In no time, Freddie is on the run: the Institute wants him for its nefarious purposes, the doctors want to study him further and a corrupt cop has his own reasons for pursuit. How Freddie and Peg run rings around the opposition, in New York and at an upstate hideaway, is the stuff of glorious Westlake comedy, in which Freddie's invisibility is merely one element in a caper full of hilarious characters, crackpot conversations and narrative sleight-of-hand.

August 1, 1995
Writing is well known as a lonely business whose practitioners are miserable, but Donald Westlake's comic crime novels provoke unbidden images of the author chuckling to himself at the word processor. His latest is full of chuckles for readers: when amiable professional thief Freddie Urban Noon breaks into a posh Manhattan brownstone that houses a research institute, he is captured by two lunatic MDs engaged in research for the tobacco industry. They take his medical history at gunpoint. They also give him a drug that renders him invisible. Freddie uses his invisibility to escape the doctors and to make big scores in diamond and fur heists, but he soon discovers that being invisible is straining his relationship with Peg, his charming significant other. Meanwhile, a hilariously malevolent tobacco tycoon hatches a plan to subvert the Human Genome Project for the good of the tobacco industry. He needs Freddie to implement his plot to "make people safe for tobacco" and employs a chillingly unhilarious rogue cop to find the invisible man. "Smoke" is deft entertainment, and this reviewer hopes the author is chuckling to himself as he produces the next one. ((Reviewed August 1995))(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 1995, American Library Association.)