90% good, then poor finish
I picked up this book with the hope it would be on a par with Lawrence Block's excellent "Bernie the Burglar" series. But it isn't. It starts out reading like a comical cozy mystery, albeit with too much unnatural profanity. Stanley Hastings is hired by a rich lady to find out who is giving her threatening phone calls, and as he starts investigating, people drop dead. And then more interesting things happen, like a fish message that sounds like something the mafia might do. But just as it is getting good, the book takes a terrible left turn about 30 pages from the end, leaving me feeling terribly cheated. And the very final scene made no sense whatsoever... how in the world did the criminal get nabbed? I am sorry, this just didn't work for me at all.