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Second adventure of Mendoza's anonymous "detective", who is once again busted out of the lunatic asylum by Inspector Flores to help the police in some extracurricular activities. This time it's an apparently simple courier job, delivering a briefcase full of ransom money, but needless to say it all goes horribly wrong, and our protagonist, acting throughout in the best traditions of the thriller genre, manages to make an already murky situation hopelessly confused, aided and abetted by a beautiful-but-unemployed actress and an elderly man in pyjamas. Along the way he has to adopt multiple disguises and deal with a corrupt theatrical agency and a sinister multinational olive-stuffing cartel, whilst the grand finale is a superbly over-the-top Ian Fleming parody.

Don't look for any logic in the plot: it's all tied together with nothing more than the power of narrative inevitability, and we are even less sure at the end of the book than we were at the beginning whether there was ever a mystery to be solved. But that's not the point: it's all gloriously entertaining, and the freedom it gives Mendoza to invent ridiculous situations pays off. ( )