THE DEAL GOES DOWN

In his latest appearance, aging ex–private eye Tony Cassella is drawn into a murder-for-hire scheme that puts him in the crosshairs of a thuggish Russian oligarch called God.

A man of many guises, the 70-year-old Tony is in a depressed state when he encounters an expensively dressed woman with a dangerous plan on an Amtrak train. He's headed to the funeral of an old friend, his daughter wants nothing to do with him following the death of his wife and son, and his prized home in Woodstock, New York, is about to be foreclosed. The wealthy woman, Maddie, who knows he used to be a detective, offers him $100,000 to kill her abusive and philandering husband. She is backed by Elizabeth, a financier who invests in "good causes." The husband, dosed with LSD, gets what's coming. ("Is it possible to have a satirical hallucination?" asks a chapter heading.) Tony, while being pursued by his former partner for a share of the big payoff, is pressured into traveling to an Austrian resort to rescue an American woman and her young son from the nasty clutches of her billionaire Russian husband, Grigor God Voloshin. Guns get pulled, people get killed, and Tony survives to spin out tough-guy witticisms and random thoughts, dropping cultural references ranging from Nietzsche to The Mickey Mouse Club to The Maltese Falcon. Determinedly offbeat, the book has as one of its characters a well-connected novelist named Larry Beinhart. The riffing can at times be a bit much. But the enjoyment the real Beinhart derives from his spritzing, free-wheeling approach lifts the book, which at its best is a cross between Stanley Elkin and Raymond Chandler.

A comic noir with a voice all its own.