Neal Carey has to keep the mob, the FBI, and a major television personality from killing his newest client, but he’s tempted to do the job himself.
Sometime student and ever-reluctant detective Neal Carey would rather be finishing a dull doctoral thesis than staring down the nose of a loaded gun, but his new assignment doesn’t sound dangerous. All he has to do is pull off the ultimate makeover: turn Polly Paget, a gum-chewing, foul-mouthed, big-haired broad, into a perfect lady in time to testify in a rape case against Jack Landis, head of the Family Cable Network and America’s most beloved family man. But Polly isn’t cooperating, and everyone (including a former FBI agent, an obsessive-compulsive hitman, the Mafia, a porn prince, and a slew of tabloid reporters) is on her trail, turning Neal’s “simple” assignment into a deadly game of duck-duck-goose.
In a hellish and hilarious escapade that takes him from the deserts of Nevada to the bright lights of Las Vegas and finally to a hair-raising climax in a shoddily built amusement park, Neal tries to escape the mob’s big guns while taking a slippery walk up the world’s biggest water slide.
Don Winslow is the author of twenty-three acclaimed, award-winning international bestsellers, including six New York Times bestsellers (Savages, The Kings of Cool, The Cartel, The Force, The Border and City on Fire). Savages was made into a feature film by three-time Oscar-winning writer-director Oliver Stone and a screenplay by Shane Salerno, Winslow and Stone. Winslow's epic Cartel trilogy has been adapted for TV and will appear as a weekly series on FX in 2023. The Force is soon to be a major motion picture from 20th Century Studios starring Matt Damon with James Mangold directing from a Scott Frank screenplay. Additional Winslow books are currently in development at Netflix, Warner Brothers, Sony and Working Title and he has recently written a series of acclaimed short stories for Audible narrated by four-time Oscar nominee Ed Harris.