The California Roll: A Novel Book

Oh, what a joy this was to read -- full of linguistic inventiveness and often outrageously funny.

Radar Hoverlander is a highly successful grifter: he makes a good living by running scams, relying on his wits and his innate talents for bafflegab. When he runs into the lovely Allie Quinn at a party that he's crashed, he soon realizes he's met his match -- which doesn't stop him wanting to get her under the Radar, so to speak. It seems all she wants him to do is educate her grandfather, a retired investment broker, into the new hobby he's eager to try: scamming. But Allie's supposed grandfather isn't who he seems, and neither is the cop who's come all the way from Australia in search of master hacker/scammer Billy Yuan and insists Radar help in that quest. Matters aren't being helped in the slightest by Radar's sidekick Vic Mirplo, the dumbest scammer of them all. With constantly shifting allegiances, new revelations at every turn, and no one -- even Radar -- ever necessarily being who they claim to be, things could hardly get more complicated; even so, they're not as simple as they seem . . .

There are countless good lines. Here, chosen more or less at random, are a couple to give you a flavor of the rest:
I don't have a lot of experience with tequila, but I know you've had too much when you go to brush something off your shoulder and it's the floor.
I swear to God, before senility sweeps over me, I'm going to put together a lethal dose of sleeping pills and keep them by my bed with a note that reads, "When you forget what these are for, take them."
If you like Donald Westlake's comedy thrillers and Carl Hiaasen's Florida novels, you should leap at this. The language dances along and there's the constant fascination of the scams themselves, as if a conjurer were explaining the secrets of her most mystifying illusions: I don't know how much of the information here on scams and scamming is actually authentic, but it certainly reads as if it is.

My only real quibble with the book is that, toward the end, the plot gets so convoluted that it began to overburden proceedings: there's a real or faked doublecross or two too many. But that's a relatively small objection.

I noticed on coming to Goodreads this morning that this is apparently vol 1 in a series, and my heart sank. The book's complete in itself. There is absolutely no need (aside from the obvious mercenary one) to inflate it into a series.