DRAWING DEAD

A ribald debut novel of sting and countersting—with one eye on Elmore Leonard and the other on the impossible dream of a cabin on a solitary Minnesota island. The island dreamer, Joe Crow, ex-cop, ex-doper, turns down coked- up broker Dickie Wicky's request to find his roving wife Catfish's current lover and pay him $10,000 to disappear—but when a wild poker game leaves Dickie holding Crow's marker, Crow, still hoping to raise money for a down payment on that cabin, agrees to work off the debt by running Dickie's errand. He doesn't know that the search for Catfish will be only the first of a series of increasingly tricky bait-and- switch games, since her ``love stud''—Tommy Campo (a.k.a. Tommy Paine, Tom Aquinas, and T.K. Jefferson)—is half of the Tom and Ben Show, a pair of deuces already on the run from Chicago tough guy Joey Cadillac and his envoy Freddy Wisnesky. Whether Crow owes Dickie or Dickie owes Crow, every new twist—from another poker game where Crow meets Ben to a quick tumble with the insatiable Catfish—leaves Crow more and more tangled in the Galactic Guardians Fund, Tom and Ben's comic-book scam; Dickie's endless stream of moneymaking propositions; and Joey's search-and-destroy mission against Tom and Ben and anybody who's seen them. So, taking a deep breath, Crow ropes his punk neighbor Laura Debrowski and his irascible father Sam O'Gara into a scheme that'll rake in the cash by appealing to the bad guys' worst instincts—if it doesn't get Crow & Co. killed first. A first novel that's overplotted within an inch of its life, but relaxed and consistently entertaining—with some great poker and a positively sunny view of its lowlife principals.