Book Description

“If Alfred Hitchcock could remake Fargo, it might feel something like Carkeet’s comic-absurd latest” (Publishers Weekly). Denny Braintree, a wisecracking loner devoted to model trains, has found himself stranded in Vermont. His night at the hotel begins promisingly—until his prospective one-night stand walks out on him. As he prepares to leave town, someone mistakes Denny for Homer Dumpling—a local man who mysteriously disappeared three years earlier, and who apparently looks a whole lot like Denny. Instead of correcting the mistake, Denny slips into his new identity as easily as a winter fleece. And it’s a good thing too, because the woman he’d hoped to sleep with has turned up dead, and the chief suspect is the out-of-towner who was pursuing her at the hotel . . . As Denny tries to unravel the mystery, he struggles to hide his true identity from Homer’s increasingly suspicious circle of family and friends, including Homer’s prickly girlfriend. The adventures of this fast-talking bumbler as his survival instincts are put to the test make for a rollicking novel by an author who has produced “some of the funniest writing since Mark Twain” (Jonathan Kellerman, New York Times–bestselling author of Night Moves). “A deftly funny book.” —Carl Hiaasen