Apparent Wind

What John Irving or Kurt Vonnegut might produce if they wrote a novel about crime and real estate set in the Florida keyshilarious and deeply satisfying, Ft. Lauderdale Sun-Sentinel Dennis Doom Lewis is a small-time conman who paid a big-price: a five-year prison sentence for forging a novel by Eleanor Roosevelt that became an international bestseller. He gets an early release to attend his crooked fathers funeraland discovers that hes inherited a sailboat and a Florida town thats sinking into the sea. But the town is on prime real estate that two warring developers want badly enough to have already killed his father for and will go to outrageous lengths to snatch away from him. Dodging bombs, corrupt cops, and crazed killers, Doom teams up with a Nyquil-chugging history professor, two documentary film-makers named Anne, and a drop-dead-sexy scuba instructor and her Seminole grandmother in an elaborate plot to swindle the swindlers and save himself from fatally living up to his nick-name. A flamboyant, comic nightmare. The author's best inventions are his characters -- gaudy as comic-strip villains, unpredictable as ancient gods and given to mighty mock-heroic combat of epic consequence. There is fun here, but also real fury in Mr. Murphys raging imagination, The New York Times Dallas Murphy is right up there with Elmore Leonard and Carl Hiaasen. I loved it Donald Westlake Masterful. Apparent Wind is much more than an excellent crime novel, Palm Beach Post A loopy, cynical, romantic caper novel. Daring and funny and smart, Miami Herald ** From Library Journal Released early from prison to attend his con-man father's Florida funeral, unflappable Dennis "Doom" Loomis (incarcerated for literary fraud) inherits a large sailboat; a sinking, decrepit town on Omnium Key; and his father's oddball friends. Soon tangled up with two deluded and rapacious descendants of early Florida land developers, who attempt to wreak further havoc on the neighborhood, Doom and entourage retaliate with clever disguises and precocious procedures. As their off-the-wall antics grow more absurdly successful, the plot becomes funnier and funnier. An unusual, noteworthy effort from the author of Lover Man (Scribner, 1987). Copyright 1990 Reed Business Information, Inc. Book Description What John Irving or Kurt Vonnegut might produce if they wrote a novel about crime and real estate set in the Florida keyshilarious and deeply satisfying, Ft. Lauderdale Sun-Sentinel Dennis Doom Lewis is a small-time conman who paid a big-price: a five-year prison sentence for forging a novel by Eleanor Roosevelt that became an international bestseller. He gets an early release to attend his crooked fathers funeraland discovers that hes inherited a sailboat and a Florida town thats sinking into the sea. But the town is on prime real estate that two warring developers want badly enough to have already killed his father for and will go to outrageous lengths to snatch away from him. Dodging bombs, corrupt cops, and crazed killers, Doom teams up with a Nyquil-chugging history professor, two documentary film-makers named Anne, and a drop-dead-sexy scuba instructor and her Seminole grandmother in an elaborate plot to swindle the swindlers and save himself from fatally living up to his nick-name. A flamboyant, comic nightmare. The author's best inventions are his characters -- gaudy as comic-strip villains, unpredictable as ancient gods and given to mighty mock-heroic combat of epic consequence. There is fun here, but also real fury in Mr. Murphys raging imagination, The New York Times Dallas Murphy is right up there with Elmore Leonard and Carl Hiaasen. I loved it Donald Westlake Masterful. Apparent Wind is much more than an excellent crime novel, Palm Beach Post A loopy, cynical, romantic caper novel. Daring and funny and smart, Miami Herald