I hate to pan any book with a central theme of suicide, but
the writing style of this book seems intended for a sixth grade audience. The prose is choppy, and the plot, aside from
the suicide ten years earlier, is silly, sappy, juvenile, repetitive, and replete
with slapstick humor. I totally fail to
grasp why this author is so popular. The
main action takes place during an apartment viewing in which a
not-very-threatening bank robber shows up after a failed heist. During the course of this “hostage”
situation, a man in a rabbit head appears, pizza is delivered, and fireworks
are requested in lieu of a ransom. The
timeline seesaws between the apartment viewing and the aftermath in which a
father and son police team interview the hostages in an effort to locate the
bank robber, who has inexplicably disappeared.
Along the way we discover the personal problems of the apartment viewers—an
elderly woman, a retired couple, a lesbian couple, and a wealthy banker--as
well as why they are attending the viewing.
The book title applies to every character, including the banker’s
therapist, and all of them sound like the type of people whose troubles appear
in advice columns. This book has
elements in common with a cozy mystery, but those books, though equally convoluted
and G-rated, are not generally this wacky.
If you want to read something humorous, go with
Jonathan
Tropper instead. Don’t waste
your time on something this frivolous and asinine.
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