FAKE LIAR CHEAT

Entertaining, movie-thin comedy not out to change your life, only to offer an amusing read, which it does with high success.

Like Val, who hires and fires for the Cosmodemonic telegraph company in Tropic of Capricorn, Lonnie Milton, 25, is a rising supervisor at L.A.'s Staff Genius, a company that releases temps as if at random into the mazes of La-La-Land. Lonnie's aging supervisor, Julie, has been taking lots of sick leave and entrusting the company to Lonnie and his lackadaisical drinking buddy Charlie—though how they keep their sales numbers up is a mystery. One night Lonnie meets drop-dead gorgeous Claire Goodens (née Hilary Peck), who introduces Lonnie to the highest high life in L.A., all of it stolen. At trendy Intermezzo, they run up a dinner bill of $670 plus tip, then stiff the waiter and blithely take off in a waiting cab. The waiter, fired for not having enough money to repay the restaurant, turns up at Staff Genius, looking for a job from Lonnie. When Lonnie sends Claire out to fill a temp job, she semi-seduces the boss; Lonnie blackmails him (splitting with Claire the $1,500 down payment); and the boss leaps from his office window. These shenanigans, and his later identification as a restaurant terrorist, lead Lonnie to get violently evicted from his apartment, to come near death after an overdose of painkillers on top of alcohol, to lose his own job, to become a murder suspect, and to turn into the culture-hero darling of TV news.

The killer climax mixes Steinbeck's “Tell me about the rabbits, George” with Thelma and Louise's high-flying electricity. A perfect trade paperback with all the sleaze and glamour of the old paperbacks of 50 years ago.