Reviews for Big Trouble

The average rating for Big Trouble based on 2 reviews is 4 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2018-03-20 00:00:00 James Dicke I am pretty uncertain about what to say about this book. It has the potential of a truly high-class satire, but anyhow the flow can´t be maintained constantly. This could have been a unique work, but it would have probably needed a bit more fine-tuning to become a real jewel instead of being an average, good read. Especially during the second half, it seems as if the author had lost interest in the brilliant, interspersed details and innuendos and just wanted to focus on the indifferent story and changed to a faster telling mode that couldn´t integrate as much wit as the first half. But hey, Stephen King praised it and like a lemming style blind fanboy of him, I couldn´t dislike something he appreciated. And it really isn´t bad, just switched from great to normal in the middle of the game and who is unguilty of such behavior may throw the first stone. Ok, Stephen King was in the same band as the author, but that is certainly just a coincidence... Tropes show how literature is conceived and which mixture of elements makes works and genres unique:

Review # 2 was written on 2017-11-28 00:00:00 Randy Scopely As it happens, the Herk household did have a dog, named Roger. Roger was the random result of generations of hasty, unplanned dog sex: among other characteristics he had the low-slung body of a beagle, the pointy ears of a German shepherd, the enthusiasm of a Labrador retriever, the stubby tail of a boxer, and the intelligence of a celery. Dave Barry may have written here a sort of National Lampoon's parody of the typical crime novel, but he brings into the equation a lot more intelligence than the proverbial celery. The result is the perfect beach read for me: witty, fast-paced and surprisingly hard hitting on the subject of institutional corruption. I've read this on my holiday a few months back, so the details of the plot are a little vague : there's an investigative reporter turned advertising designer, there's a wealthy real-estate investor with a dysfunctional family, a couple of Russian gangsters running a bar, another couple of panty-hosed dime-store robbers, another couple of paid killers from up North, another couple of angsty teenagers, another couple of patrol cops with gender issues, a squirt gun, a giant South American Toad, some goats lost in traffic on the highway, a pothead living in a tree, gazombas, a nuclear weapon and that mongrel dog from my opening quote). The reason I'm not even trying to write a synopsis is that the action is too crazy for words. Dave Barry is mainly a stand-up comedian and a current issues columnist, but his foray into novel writing had me laughing out loud in public more than once. It's better to discover for yourself what hi-jinks his characters are up to in this romp. Florida is a hotbed of criminal activity that has spawned a whole new subgenre in my adhoc study of American crime fiction. Yet Florida crime novels have something that its more famous northern neighbors from New York, Chicago, Las Vegas or Los Angeles don't seem to possess: a certain wackiness both in plot and in characters that gives it a special flavour I can only describe as 'sunny' noir : it takes most of the ingredients of the classical crime story (the gumshoe, the femme fatale, the mob boss, the paid killer, etc) and then pours over them the blinding light of the tropical sun, makes their brains boil over and do crazy stuff. I was already familiar with the works of Lawrence Sanders (McNally), Carl Hiaasen (Skink), John D MacDonald (Travis McGee) and Tim Dorsey (Serge Storms). And now I have to add Dave Barry to this growing shelf of crime stories coming from the Panhandle. —«»—«»—«»— P.S. After finishing the book I realized the story was very familiar not because of the other writers I mentioned above, but because I have seen the movie adaptation a long time ago. So I went and watched the DVD again , and it turns out to be very close to the source material, with an incredible cast (Janeanne Garofalo is my favorite, but all of the actors were great in their roles) .