Sometimes you need a little levity in your crime fiction. Well, Brian W. Wiprud’s CROOKED fits the bill. It has moments of humor, but not belly laughs – it’s still a crime novel through and through.
Nicholas Palihnic is an insurance investigator dealing mainly with the art world. As we meet him, he’s on a case, looking for a lost painting titled Trampoline Nude 1972. (Since it’s an abstract painting, the title is just a title.) The work is described as depicting two bannanas and a pineapple with a number 78 on it, and has been stolen by a devious art dealer named Beatrice Belarus – or “BB” for short – who is brokering its illegal sale to a collector in Hong Kong.
But that is only one of the storylines in this fun little tale. Barney, a former thief now turned securtiy advisor, is supposedly dead in Costa Rica, or so his girlfriend is lead to believe. She wants Nichols to find out for sure. What he finds involves two pothead brothers who make Jethro Bodine look like Stephen Hawking, and them digging holes into Randall’s Island in search of a ship. It all makes sense when you read the book.
CROOKED is just filled to the brim with off-the-wall characters. From a stereotypically snooty art gallery owner, a former NYC female police detective, a Argentinian women with a mean streak and a British investigator who might be a bit corrupt. While reading the book, my mind kept referencing two characters that I really think influenced Wiprud: one of course being Lovejoy, BBC’s shady antiques dealer, and the second being an old George Peppard TV character called Banachek, who also dealt with insurance investigations into bizarre thefts. Regardless, CROOKED is a joyride through the crime world worthy of being discovered by all. –Bruce Grossman
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