In this novel, two New York City street photographers develop a deadly get-rich-quick scheme.
Resourceful Bingo Riggs and his partner, Handsome Kusak, are in the sucker-bait business, snapping candid pics of tourists off Central Park. Their fly-by-night enterprise can be irresistible to souvenir lovers, but with one camera in a pawnshop and their developing room in the bathtub of a two-room dump near Hell’s Kitchen, their venture is wretchedly underexposed—until they stumble upon an insurance fraud scheme between the allegedly dead eccentric Mr. S. S. Pigeon and his business partner and beneficiary.
There’s only one way for Bingo and Handsome to muscle in on that half-million-dollar claim: kidnap Pigeon and blackmail his coconspirator. Unfortunately, their foolproof plan comes with mobsters, a dodgy chorus girl, multiple murders, a refrigerated corpse, and the strange Mr. Pigeon himself, who, it seems, likes being a hostage. In fact, he has no intention of escaping. It’s the surest way to protect his own secret—which could be Bingo and Handsome’s biggest threat.
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“This audiobook is lowbrow, high energy, and absurdly good fun. Johnny Heller narrates a 1940s-style mystery in a voice suggestive of tough guys in old detective movies…Heller also portrays many other zany characters, employing a range of timing and vocalization.”
— AudioFile
“Grand combination of whimsy and wickedness.”
— Saturday Review of Literature“Very fast, funny, and good.”
— Newsweek“Brisk and very funny.”
— New Yorker“Along with the comedy you have a genuinely puzzling mystery.”
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Craig Rice (1908–1957), born Georgiana Ann Randolph Craig, was an American author of mystery novels and short stories, sometimes described as the “Dorothy Parker of detective fiction.” She was the first mystery writer to appear on the cover of Time magazine, on January 28, 1946.
Johnny Heller, winner of numerous Earphones and Audie Awards, was named a “Golden Voice” by AudioFile magazine in 2019. He has been a Publishers Weekly Listen-Up Award winner from 2008 through 2013 and he has been named a top voice of 2008 and 2009 and selected as one of the Top 50 Narrators of the Twentieth Century by AudioFile magazine.