Saratoga Strongbox — Stephen Dobyns

I have always been the pal of easy money. What some people call temptation, I call opportunity." 5o begin the musings of Victor Plotz without whom, says the New York Times Book Review, "the world would be a much stuffier place." The shameless sidekick of Charlie Bradshaw, longtime star of Stephen Dobyns's acclaimed mystery series, Victor manages to offend everyone but the reader in this pitch-perfect, sneaky, and sometimes laugh-out-loud-funny novel. Victor feels his wallet throb whenever anyone mentions a quick buck, so despite the fact that life is good and love is in the air, he agrees to collect a suspicious suitcase in Montreal for a miserly old man. But after farming out the job to bumbling black belt Eddie Gillespie, he finds himself embroiled in a fiasco involving two knee-capping thugs and an Amazon stripper.