"Block is a master of witty dialogue, plotting and pace, and the series' wacky, offbeat characters make great companions." —Cleveland Plain-Dealer "Fans will welcome it. New readers will delight in it. A witty, and always affectionate, sendup of the genre." —Denver Post "Clever and amusing." —Detroit Free Press "Wittily diverting...rather like an Agatha Christie novel narrated by Basil Fawlty, or a game of Clue organized by Monty Python." —Entertainment Weekly "Block peoples his mystery with a wacky cast of characters who all happen to have a knack for snappy dialogue, the wackiest and snappiest being Bernie himself, of course." —Florida Times-Union "Rhodenbarr is one of the slickest characters in crime, and Block...one of the most talented writers." —Houston Chronicle "...you'd rather be stranded on a desert island with [Bernie Rhodenbarr] than with any other detective in fiction." —Kirkus Reviews "In his Matthew Scudder books, Block is one of the most serious of crime novelists. When he chronicles Bernie...Block is one of the funniest...[Bernie] is enough to give burglary a good name." —Los Angeles Times
Bernie Rhodenbarr has gone legit — almost — as the new owner of a used bookstore in New York's Greenwich Village. Of course, dusty old tomes don't always turn a profit, so to make ends meet, Bernie's forced, on occasion, to indulge in his previous occupation: burglary. Besides which, he likes it.
Now a collector is offering Bernie an opportunity to combine his twin passions by stealing a very rare and very bad book-length poem from a rich man's library.
The heist goes off without a hitch. The delivery of the ill-gotten volume, however, is a different story. Drugged by the client's female go-between, Bernie wakes up in her apartment to find the book gone, the lady dead, a smoking gun in his hand, and the cops at the door. And suddenly he's got to extricate himself from a rather sticky real-life murder mystery and find a killer — before he's booked for Murder One.
