Saratoga Strongbox: A Charlie Bradshaw Mystery

"I have always been the pal of easy money. What some people call temptation, I call opportunity." So begins cult character Victor Plotz--without whom, says The New York Times Book Review, "the world would be a much stuffier place." Life is good, and love is in the air, for Vic and for Charlie Bradshaw, the sharp-eyed, crumpled ex-cop who's as straight--relatively--as Vic is devious. But Vic wants it to be better, and he leaps at two thousand bucks to collect a mystery suitcase in Montreal. That's when the trouble begins, with an offbeat cast that includes a black-belted youth with lousy karma, a shady operator and his sloppy son, the son's stripper Amazon girlfriend who dumps him for a jockey, and Rosemary the queen of softness, Vic's current squeeze. Saratoga Strongbox sets Charlie on the trail of every deadly sin from dirty money to outright murder. Just in time for racing season and summer gift-giving, this is "jaunty and colorful, good tongue-in-cheek fun" (The Boston Sunday Globe).