Texas musician Friedman writes mysteries the way he sings -- lots of humming, head-scratching and general fooling around. There are always plenty of cigars and an inevitable cat. But his loyal fans lap up his books and will certainly welcome this newest addition. The Kinkster's boozy reporter (is there any another kind in mystery fiction?) friend McGovern is being plagued by FBI agents disguised as aliens, so Friedman sets off on a journey of discovery to Washington and Al Capone's old Chicago haunts.


From Publishers Weekly
Gonzo crime writer and former country singer Friedman's rambling ninth book (God Bless John Wayne) featuring ornery, cigar-munching, amateur sleuth Kinky Friedman brims with political paranoia and male bonding. The Kinkster is rescued from melancholia when mysterious, slinky Polly Price visits his West Village loft in Manhattan and, "rising out of the fog like a pirate ship," hires him to locate her missing husband, a well-heeled New York lawyer. While sorting through the man's legal and financial affairs, Kinky is sidetracked by his distressed buddy Michael McGovern (a member of Kinky's entourage, The Village Irregulars), who claims he's being shadowed by government agents. McGovern also says he's getting calls from a long-deceased man named Leaning Jesus who used to be Al Capone's chef and may or may not have left McGovern clues to the mobster's buried treasure. The lawyer quest leads Kinky into a sequence of deadly setups (he is framed with a suitcase full of cocaine, shot in the arm by the police and trapped in a flaming limousine in Chicago) before he begins to realize that that case was a pretext meant to prevent him from rescuing McGovern from an FBI sting. Distracting digressions, wacky nostalgia trips, remarkably bad puns and Kinky's miasmic self-absorption blur the finer points of the story line. But by his own admission, the Kinkster is a hapless gum-shoe, relying on Sherlock Holmes stories and sleuthing mentor, Rambam, to unravel a case that's built on plenty of unlikely twists and revelations. 100,000 first printing; QPB alternate; author tour. Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.


From Library Journal
This Friedman, who boasts a cult following abroad, may finally make it in his homeland with his newest mystery.Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.


The New York Times Book Review
The world's funniest, bawdiest, and most politically incorrect country music singer turned mystery writer... a classic... the humor gleams as brightly as Kinky's "brontosaurusforeskin" boots.


From Booklist
With a tip o' the hat to ol' T. S., Texas-troubadour-turned-author Friedman dishes up another eminently entertaining caper featuring Texas-troubadour-turned-Big-Apple-dick Kinky. All the familiar accoutrements are here: cowboy hat, cigar, Jameson Irish whiskey, cat, puppet head, lesbian dance class upstairs, and the Kinkster's caustic and irreverent observations. A case involving a leggy blond looking for her missing husband intertwines with that of Kinky's friend McGovern, who claims he's being hounded by the late Leaning Jesus (former cook for Al Capone and maybe the missing link to the Chicago gangster's hidden treasure). Kinky is soon led on a wild goose chase that gets him shot at by D.C. cops and a seat for a near-fatal limo ride in the Windy City (our singing sleuth's birthplace). To top things off, both clients go missing, and the much-maligned FBI may be involved. Is our "country-and-western Miss Jane Marple" in over his head? He usually is. Benjamin Segedin


From Kirkus Reviews
Two new cases for the Sherlock of 199B Vandam Street: Walk- in D.C. lawyer Polly Price wants him to find her missing husband Derrick, and Kinky's madman buddy Michael McGovern is convinced he's getting phone calls from Leaning Jesus, his old father figure who doubled as Al Capone's chef. Since searching for Derrick Price looks as if it might have money in it, Kinky, ``probably the only Jew in America who has never felt guilt,'' chases down leads on him first, but, as J. Edgar Hoover might have said, some days the bear gets you. The apartment Kinky's sources lead him to in the Nation's Capital is Priceless, devoid of any clue except for a half-million-dollar coke stash and half a million D.C. cops. And another tip that sends Kinky to Chicago practically ends his life in a limo that doubles as a hearse (think mobile Roach Motel). Just when the case seems to be going nowhere, Kinky's p.i. friend Steve Rambam comes up with a great reason Kinky can't find Derrick Price: because he's been dead seven years--a revelation that makes McGovern's Leaning Jesus heebie-jeebies look like they might be, relatively speaking, the best show in town. Colloquys with the cat, tasteful jokes about intimate body functions, a hunt for Capone's treasure, and practically an entire bottle of Macallan's Single Malt: They're all in the Kinkster's ninth opus (God Bless John Wayne, 1995, etc.), along with his best-constructed adventure ever. As if you'd notice. (First printing of 100,000; author tour) -- Copyright ©1996, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.


Book Description
"DEAR KINKY: I HAVE NOW READ ALL YOUR BOOKS. MORE PLEASE. I REALLY NEED THE LAUGHS."
--Bill Clinton

A beautiful woman, a missing husband, and a private eye with eyes for his comely client. It's the classic hardboiled-mystery setup. But in the grip of Kinky Friedman, expect one of the wildest, wackiest, and weirdest rides of your life!

"A novel to be read for the sheer joy of it."
--The Baltimore Sun



From the Publisher
"The world's funniest, bawdiest, and most politically incorrect country music singer turned mystery writer."
--The New York Times Book Review"Kinky is a hip hybrid of Groucho Marx and Sam Spade."
--Chicago Tribune"Kinky Friedman is to the detective novel what Frank Zappa is to rock and roll: a gleeful gadfly who delights in offending purists.... There's just no stopping him. And who wants to?"
--People"A killer bee... His latest is his best."
--The Virginian Pilot


From the Inside Flap
"DEAR KINKY: I HAVE NOW READ ALL YOUR BOOKS. MORE PLEASE. I REALLY NEED THE LAUGHS."
--Bill Clinton

A beautiful woman, a missing husband, and a private eye with eyes for his comely client. It's the classic hardboiled-mystery setup. But in the grip of Kinky Friedman, expect one of the wildest, wackiest, and weirdest rides of your life!

"A novel to be read for the sheer joy of it."
--The Baltimore Sun


About the Author
Kinky Friedman lives in a little green trailer in a little green valley deep in the heart of Texas. There are about ten million imaginary horses in the valley and quite often they gallop around Kinky's trailer, encircling the author in a terrible, ever-tightening carousel of death. Even as the hooves are pounding around him in the darkest night, one can hear, almost in counterpoint, the frail, consumptive, ascetic novelist tip-tip-tapping away on the last typewriter in Texas. In such fashion he has turned out nine novels including God Bless John Wayne, Armadillos & Old Lace, and Elvis, Jesus, & Coca-Cola. Two cats, Dr. Scat and Lady Argyle; a pet armadillo called Dilly; and a small black dog named Mr. Magoo can sometimes be found sleeping with Kinky in his narrow, monastic, Father Damien-like bed.


Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
It was New Year's Day. I stood at the kitchen window sipping a hot, bitter espresso and gazing down at the raw, grainy, half-deserted, fog-shrouded countenance of Vandam Street. It looked a lot like I felt. On this day in 1953 Hank Williams had died somewhere along the way to a show in Canton, Ohio. Whether death is indeed preferable to doing a show in Canton, Ohio, has been a much disputed philosophical question ever since. About the only thing I could say for sure was that Hank Williams had been dead almost as long as I'd been alive, and the older I got the more he seemed to be catching up with me.

The cat sat smugly on the windowsill, smiling at a pigeon on the other side of the glass.

"You're probably a big fan of Hank Williams, Jr.," I said, on a thinly disguised note of facetiousness.

The cat said nothing. She looked at me calmly for a moment, blinked several times, then returned her gaze to the pigeon.

I drank some more espresso and watched the fog. Facetiousness, I reflected, was one of the many elements of subtlety that was most assuredly lost upon cats. It was also, of course, lost upon Hank Williams, Jr. But that wasn't entirely his fault....

I was contemplating the rather ludicrous notion of a man-and-cat suicide pact when the phones rang. There are two phones in the loft, on opposite sides of my desk. Both of them are red and both of them are connected to the same line in order to enhance the importance of any incoming wounded I may receive. Neither of them had rung in my recent memory. I walked across the kitchen and over to the desk and picked up the blower on the left.

"Start talkin'," I said.

"My name is Polly Price," said a husky voice. It was a woman I didn't know. As I reached inside the porcelain head of Sherlock Holmes for a cigar, I tried to think of a woman I could really say I did know.

"Polly want a private investigator?" I said hopefully.

"As a matter of fact," she said, "I do."

To calm the wild beating of my heart, I lopped the butt off my cigar and lit it with a kitchen match, always keeping the level of the flame slightly below the tip of the cigar. In my narrow experience as a country singer turned amateur detective, I'd had very few real live, honest-to-God, walk-in-off-the-streets clients. One of the reasons for this was that it was impossible to walk in off the street through the front doors of the building to get to my fourth-floor loft unless you stood out on the sidewalk and hollered loud enough to get my attention, whereupon I would toss you down the little black puppet head with the key wedged tightly into its friendly, ingenuous smile.

"Hello. Are you there?"

"Yes," I said. "How did you hear about us?" I glanced briefly at the cat. She had moved over to the kitchen table by now and seemed to be taking a bit more interest in the situation.

"I'd rather not discuss anything about the case over the phone," she said.

"Of course not," I said, puffing understandingly on the cigar. The woman was probably a little out of touch with the mother ship.

FROM OUR EDITORS

The world's bawdiest country-singer-turned-writer has gotten his hero (and namesake) into trouble again, this time with a young lady and a guy named Leaning Jesus. Nothing is sacred with Kinky; his latest whodunit shows why.

ANNOTATION

From the author of such outrageous and hilarious books as Elvis, Jesus & Coca-Cola, and God Bless John Wayne--a new Kinky Friedman (no relation) detective story. Soon after he is hired by a lovely young woman to find her missing husband, Kinky smells a rat. But it's not until he's been shot by the D.C. police and locked in a burning limousine that he figures he may be the one with his tail in a trap.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

Filled with adventure, passion, excitement, and a fair amount of talk about cats and puppet heads, this latest installment in the on-going saga of man's inhumanity to the English language finds New York's most cosmic private detective launched once again on an investigation that leads him far afield of both the law and the lower Manhattan loft he calls home. In The Love Song of J. Edgar Hoover, Kinky Friedman, the author, has Kinky Friedman, the detective (in real life, the two are not related), rush to the aid of a lovely young woman, only to find that he is up to his shin splints in trouble of a disconcerting kind. Soon after Polly Price hires him to find her missing husband, Kinky smells a rat. But it's not until he's been shot by the D.C. police and locked in a burning limousine by a Chicago chauffeur that he realizes he may be the one with his tail in a trap. Then, when Michael McGovern, longtime friend and loyal member of the Village Irregulars, complains first of being watched by mysterious men, then of getting threatening phone calls from a dead gangster named Leaning Jesus, and finally disappears - and along with him, the lovely Polly - Kinky comes to the only conclusion that conceivably could link these disparate events: the FBI is after him!

FROM THE CRITICS

Publishers Weekly

Gonzo crime writer and former country singer Friedman's rambling ninth book (God Bless John Wayne) featuring ornery, cigar-munching, amateur sleuth Kinky Friedman brims with political paranoia and male bonding. The Kinkster is rescued from melancholia when mysterious, slinky Polly Price visits his West Village loft in Manhattan and, "rising out of the fog like a pirate ship," hires him to locate her missing husband, a well-heeled New York lawyer. While sorting through the man's legal and financial affairs, Kinky is sidetracked by his distressed buddy Michael McGovern (a member of Kinky's entourage, The Village Irregulars), who claims he's being shadowed by government agents. McGovern also says he's getting calls from a long-deceased man named Leaning Jesus who used to be Al Capone's chef and may or may not have left McGovern clues to the mobster's buried treasure. The lawyer quest leads Kinky into a sequence of deadly setups (he is framed with a suitcase full of cocaine, shot in the arm by the police and trapped in a flaming limousine in Chicago) before he begins to realize that that case was a pretext meant to prevent him from rescuing McGovern from an FBI sting. Distracting digressions, wacky nostalgia trips, remarkably bad puns and Kinky's miasmic self-absorption blur the finer points of the story line. But by his own admission, the Kinkster is a hapless gum-shoe, relying on Sherlock Holmes stories and sleuthing mentor, Rambam, to unravel a case that's built on plenty of unlikely twists and revelations. 100,000 first printing; QPB alternate; author tour. (Sept.)

Library Journal

Friedman has come a long way since his days in country music, during which he produced such campy songs as "They Ain't Making Jews Like Jesus Anymore." Now, having established a hilarious, irreverent mystery series starring his New York-based namesake and a host of intriguing and quirky characters, he makes his audio debut. In The Love Song, the cigar-smoking Kinkster rushes to the aid of a damsel in distress, only to find himself shot at and his friends threatened. Although the details of the plot don't always make sense thanks to the abridgment, Friedman's one-liners will keep listeners laughing and shaking their heads. Most public libraries should have this.Mark Annichiarico, "Library Journal"

Kirkus Reviews

Two new cases for the Sherlock of 199B Vandam Street: Walk- in D.C. lawyer Polly Price wants him to find her missing husband Derrick, and Kinky's madman buddy Michael McGovern is convinced he's getting phone calls from Leaning Jesus, his old father figure who doubled as Al Capone's chef. Since searching for Derrick Price looks as if it might have money in it, Kinky, "probably the only Jew in America who has never felt guilt," chases down leads on him first, but, as J. Edgar Hoover might have said, some days the bear gets you. The apartment Kinky's sources lead him to in the Nation's Capital is Priceless, devoid of any clue except for a half-million-dollar coke stash and half a million D.C. cops. And another tip that sends Kinky to Chicago practically ends his life in a limo that doubles as a hearse (think mobile Roach Motel). Just when the case seems to be going nowhere, Kinky's p.i. friend Steve Rambam comes up with a great reason Kinky can't find Derrick Price: because he's been dead seven years—a revelation that makes McGovern's Leaning Jesus heebie-jeebies look like they might be, relatively speaking, the best show in town.

Colloquys with the cat, tasteful jokes about intimate body functions, a hunt for Capone's treasure, and practically an entire bottle of Macallan's Single Malt: They're all in the Kinkster's ninth opus (God Bless John Wayne, 1995, etc.), along with his best-constructed adventure ever. As if you'd notice.