Ringer

May 2, 2011
At the outset of Wiprud's rollicking sequel to Feelers, former Brooklyn house cleaner and endearing womanizer Morty Martinezânow independently wealthy and living in Baja Californiaâagrees to travel to New York City on Fr. Gomez Entropica's behalf to persuade 65-year-old billionaire Robert Tyson Grant, who possesses a holy relic, a gold ring once worn by a legendary conquistador, to return the sacred item to its rightful place in a La Paz orphanage. The priest is confident Grant will oblige. Once in New York, Martinez becomes entangled in numerous murder plots involving Grant, his conniving mistress, his party girl stepdaughter, an opportunistic fortune-teller, and a bumbling assassin obsessed with decapitation. Told from Martinez's jail cell the night before he's to be executed, this relentlessly amusing novel is powered by a cast of decidedly quirky characters and its idiosyncratic narrator's frequent digressions (like his defense of breast implants). Fans of the comic crime fiction of Donald E. Westlake and Charles Willeford will find a lot to like.

May 1, 2011

Morty Martinez, Brooklyn's wealthiest ex-housecleaner, returns from Bolivia for another round of criminal mischief and belly laughs.

East Hampton heiress Purity Grant has such a long record in the courts and tabloids that her mother's widower and executor, Grab-A-Lot founder Robert Tyson Grant, might well want her dead even if her hijinks didn't play havoc with both his health and that of his corporate balance sheet. With the connivance of Dixie Faltreau, the nubile and naughty director of the Grant Charitable Trust, Grant hires Paco Ramirez, that noted Mexican hit man, to get rid of Purity. But Paco is delayed by this and that, all lovingly detailed. The Latino whom Grant mistakenly welcomes into his confidence is none other than Morty (Feelers, 2009), who's been sent to recover a talismanic ring that Grant stole from a dead conquistador's severed hand back when he was a child in a La Paz orphanage. No sooner has Morty, who's just as clueless as Grant about the mixup, arrived than conspiracies and counterplots multiply as quickly as cockroaches. Dixie, whom Morty promptly lures from Grant's bed, turns out to have ideas of her own. So does the equally homicidal Purity, who's signed a contract with Ultravibe Media that pays her a whopping bonus if she can stir up three scandals within a week. And let's not forget Helena, the palm reader who swiftly realizes she can milk Grant for more than a few pesos. The whole carnival of crime is juiced by Morty's fractured, albeit mellifluous, dialogue and the conceit that he's submitting the whole story in sort-of-screenplay form to a Hollywood producer the night before his execution for murder.

Wiprud (Buy Back, 2010, etc.) even provides a wholesome moral lesson for "others who have been framed by two insane rich people who were hell-bent to kill each other."

(COPYRIGHT (2011) KIRKUS REVIEWS/NIELSEN BUSINESS MEDIA, INC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.)

May 1, 2011
Modest East Brooklynite Morty Martinez, who used to clean out houses for resale, walked away from Feelers (2009) with a financial windfall and promptly realized his lifes goal to become La Paz gentry, on a religious quest. His La Paz is a small city north of glitzy Cabo San Lucas, site of the orphanage that reared his father. Mortys quest, assigned by his priest, is to retrieve a ring stolen from the orphanage chapel that currently adorns the finger of an American billionaire. The job puts him squarely in the crosshairs of an assortment of plotters and schemers, including murderous rich folk, a luckless-but-persevering drug-cartel hit man, New Yorks tabloid press, various New York grifters, and three beautiful, calculating, dangerous women. Morty tells his tale via the screenplay hes writing while awaiting execution for murder. Even with such a deadline, he manages to squeeze in cinematographic and casting suggestions and intone, in a charming, almost courtly voice, on life, women, seduction, and piety. Feelers was a comic caper delight. Ringer is even better.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2011, American Library Association.)