Missionary Stew

There's a hint of scandal brewing - a part of a tale told by someone to someone else in Singapore, who tells someone else in the US just as they get run off the road in a hit and run. Whatever it is, it could blew the incumbent out of the White House in '84, no less, so a political fundraiser and a depressed ex-journalist start digging out the truth, and what a nest of snakes they soon find themselves tangled up in, with drug dealers, spooks, hit-men, political apparatchiks and the ex-journalist's Mother, not an incosiderable piece of work herself. Murder, threats, betrayal and a trip to a war-torn hellhole in South America follow, as does some casual racism, sexism and homophobia, jumping out of Thomas' almost laid-back prose and show more dialogue the way the violence does from his almost laid-back story, a sharp, cynical moral marker of character. show less

Welcome to the wold of Ross Thomas. I can't think of a better story teller than he was. The language is so deft and graceful, the characterization so perfectly etched even though much of the novel is the blackest of comedies, that you are swept away into a very believable world of government treachery, incompetence and viciousness all the more startling because of the ironic tone of the writing.
The novel was published in 1983 thus the U.S. government in power is quite Reaganesque and the dilemma it finds itself in not unlike (prescience on Thomas' part) Iran-Contra. The McGuffin here is intriguing--the incompeents of the CIA and the FBI want to silence anybody who can tell the tale of our goverment's atrocities. And "tell" is the show more correct word. None of the evidence is written down but there are a number of participants who can tell the story.
There is no other writer like Ross Thomas and no other novel like Missionary Stew (or most of his novels for that matter). Treat yourself to two nights of amazing reading. While he exposes the practices of our government with comedic effect, he also constructs a novel of inter-locking cliff hangers that keep you flipping pages long after you should have grabbed your teddy bear and gone to sleep. (extract from Ed Gorman's blog) show less

En realitat no l'he pogut llegir, per estrambòtic.