Suicide Squeeze

March 14, 2005
The idea of the repo man as crime solver has been popular since Joe Gores's San Francisco series; Bill Eidson is a recent convert. Now Gischler, who earned an Edgar nomination for his debut, Gun Monkeys
(2003), gets in on the act with his third novel, which features a down-at-the-heels repo man, Conner Samson, who's hired to take back a sloop, the Electric Jenny
, from its defaulting owner, Teddy Folger. Folger has burned down his comic book and baseball card store in Pensacola, Fla., for the insurance, and now plans to sail away from his old life—and wife—on the craft. But what Conner soon discovers is that an almost priceless treasure, a baseball card signed in 1954 by both Joe DiMaggio and Marilyn Monroe, is hidden on the Jenny
—and that a Japanese collector with a team of deadly ninjas will kill anyone who gets in the way of his acquiring it. Gischler is a light and clever satirist who knows how to keep a narrative moving, and Conner, who has connections to the Southern art world and a foxy married ladyfriend named Tyranny Jones, is a character well worth another visit. Agent, Noah Lukeman at Lukeman Literary Management.

March 1, 2005
Rocking like a hammock in a hurricane, this ultra-breezy Florida crime romp follows ex-jock Conner Samson as he gets caught in a deadly rundown between aging comic-book geek Teddy Folger and an oddball Japanese gangster obsessed with Americana. Teddy's holding onto pop-culture perfection: a DiMaggio baseball card signed for him by Joltin' Joe, Marilyn Monroe, " and" Billy Wilder during filming of the skirt-blowing scene in " The Seven Year Itch" . After collecting a $100,000 insurance payout for the supposedly destroyed card, Teddy tries to get cute and sell it to the Japanese collector, too. Samson, a likable if extraordinarily unlucky lunkhead, stumbles onto the scam when he's sent to repossess Teddy's yacht. While every imaginable kind of chaos is busy ensuing, Gischler treats readers to an amusing cast of Elmore Leonard cast-offs that includes a pint-size Pensacola crime boss, a nympho girlfriend inexplicably named Tyranny Jones, and an ex-NSA agent who favors her late father's pearl-handled six-shooters in a fight. This is a fast, enjoyably silly read underpinned with a surprisingly humane world view. (Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2005, American Library Association.)