One of those rare books whose laudatory cover blurbs actually bear some relation to the contents inside, The Death and Life of Bobby Z is the hair-raising, addictive and frequently funny story of ex-Marine, Gulf War vet, three time loser Tim Kearney attempting to make good on a deal from a crooked DEA agent to impersonate the deceased surfer-cum-pot smuggler par excellence named Bobby Z to escape a certain death behind prison walls following on from Kearney's neat assassination of a Hell's Angel/Aryan Brotherhood bruiser. The pitch-perfect dialogue shifts from California slacker to hard-nosed cattle rancher to pompous, self-styled hidalgo-hood with barely a bobble, and the rogues gallery is filled to bursting with off-the-reservation feds, movie-obsessed pedophiles, Eurotrash, bikers, cholos, and war vets, many of whom converge in a kind of perfect storm in the book's hellzapoppin' finale. Behind all the mayhem, buckets of black humor, jaw-dropping escapes, explicit sex and rampant profanity lurks a sweet, sentimental optimism and a message of hope and redemption that would not be out of place on the most flowery and ostentatiously religious greeting card, and it is to Winslow's credit that this comes across as part of an organic whole, not an afterthought bit of moralizing á la Scarface: The Shame of a Nation. ( )

This is a great book in its category. Frantic fun with plenty of impossible, but fun to imagine, situations. ( )

A fun romp of a book written with a sure hand. A con who is facing death at the hand of other disgruntled cons jumps at the chance to escape prison when a DEA agent asks him to impersonate a drug dealer. At least he has a chance of staying alive, if a slim one. What follows is exciting, violent, hilarious, and touching, with many double and triple crosses.