Coarse, tired old Borscht-Belt comedian Nappy Kane is a dinosaur—his career is a shambles and his bank balance anemic. Then his wife of less than a year, a Chinese mail-order bride, disappears, taking most of whatever money he had left. Saxon, hired to find her, winds up in a small town near Sacramento, where the wife of a love-connection mail-order agency is found dead in the river. When too many different people end up wanting to kill him, Saxon stays busy trying to save his own skin and that of his adopted son, Marvel.

“Saxon continues to be a glib commentator on California mores… Roberts plots with finesse and an admirable economy.” (Publisher's Weekly)

Excerpt: The Chinese people have a particular god for every occasion, a system that predates our current age of specialization by several thousand years. There’s the Kitchen God, for instance, the Sea God, the God of Business, the God of Love and Romance, and lots of others whose names and functions elude me right now. It’s a much more efficient arrangement than monotheism, when you think about it. We who worship one deity have a run of bad luck and we believe that God is punishing us because we’ve done something to make him angry. The Chinese, on the other had, simply assume it is only the Kitchen God who is pissed off when the soufflé falls, and there’s no reason to think that their business will fail, their ship will sink, or that they’ll be unable to sustain an erection. They just eat out for a while until it passes.

Publisher: St. Martin’s Press

Publication Year: 1994

Pages: 282