Foreign Exchange - Hardcover

Edgar-winner Beinhart's third suspenser about p.i. Cassella of Brooklyn and just as superbly witty as You Get What You Pay For (1988) and No One Rides For Free (1985). Tony Cassella has spent the past six years on the lam from the IRS and running the only coin-operated laundromat in a high-toned Austrian ski resort. It's a phony charge, but even so he owes the IRS a quarter million because of compound interest. Now the CIA threatens to expose Tony's false identity papers to the Austrians--he's hiding behind a passport that says he's an Irish priest, and he does wear a dickey and a priestly collar although his French girlfriend Marie is pregnant. The novel is sketched on money and the European exchange rates, although the McGuffin is a lost computer disc that holds the code for a new American fighter jet that the Germans and Japanese want as desperately as the CIA does. If Tony can recover the disc, the CIA will clear him with the IRS--or will it? Is garrulous old rogue Harry Lime (a Sidney Greenstreet type Tony meets in Vienna) really with the CIA? Is likable, Berkeley-educated ``Mike'' Hayakawa really with Musashi Aerospace of Japan? Tony's search takes him through a half dozen East bloc countries with Marie, their baby daughter, his mother, and Marie's lawgiving French mother all packed into his small car. The novel's great humor lies in Beinhart's golden ear for all variety of American, European, Japanese, and Australian dialects, accents that he captures with headspinning accuracy. Typical thumbnail of a Czech agent: ``He said everything with great intensity and a lot of hair. He had the sort of beard that collects crumbs and drama.'' Knockout fun, top-drawer plotting. This'll burn away the night. -- Copyright ©1991, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

In this sparkling international escapade, Beinhart ( No One Rides for Free ) adds a brilliant new dimension to his wisecracking PI from Brooklyn, Tony Casella. Now running a laundromat in the Austrian ski resort of St. Anton, Tony is hiding from the IRS--who were tipped off by the political powers he outwitted in his last adventure. When an American girl and a Japanese mogul are killed in an avalanche, the girl's mother persuades Tony to investigate. Events snowball; Tony is threatened by CIA agents and coerced by a Japanese conglomerate to find a computer disk missing from the mogul's effects. Going underground might save Tony from these establishment bullies, but he refuses to abandon his lover and their newborn daughter. The hunt for the disk leads him on a wild trek through Austria and Eastern bloc countries, his would-be employers in close pursuit. This witty, near-perfect caper makes merry with European cuisines, customs, currencies and politics.
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.