The Final Addiction - Softcover

Condon, Richard

3.54

28 ratings by Goodreads

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0312951566 ISBN 13: 9780312951566

Publisher: St. Martin's Paperbacks, 1993

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Owney Hazman is the American dream. He's a money-making hot-dog salesman with a beutiful wife and rich father-in-law. But Owney has a prblem: his mother left when he was nine and he's still trying to find her.

And when Owney meets scheming Oona Noon, he soon realizes his problems are just beginning. Engineer of her dim husband's bid fir the presidency, which she fuels with profits from her multi-billion dollar cocaine importing operation, Oona has plans for Owney. With the dazzle of his mythically perfect smile, he'll make the ideal point-man for one of her shadier international deals.

Now, dogged by powerful enemies-from the mandarins of Peking to the crime barons of the Prizzi's-and with no sign of his mother, Owney is hardly ready for Oona's next proposal: that he, too, belongs in politics!

The Final Addiction is a triumph of contemporary Americana from Richard Condon, the unchallenged master of high comic suspense.

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About the Author:

Richard Condon is an American novelist, playwright, and crime writer, best known for his thrillers THE MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE (1959) and PRIZZI'S HONOUR (1982). Several of Condon's books have been made into films.

From Kirkus Reviews:

Politics and cocaine spinalize Condon's latest black comedy, a strong improvement over his Emperor of America (1989). Many old friends from Condon's earlier works return here, including the Prizzis of Brooklyn and Wambly Keifetz, the head of Bahama Beaver Bonnet Co., who keeps all the Prizzi zillions in a vault in his cellar. But the hero is handsome, vacuous Owney Hazman, a former vendor of novelty cigarette lighters who has struck it nice by marrying into the frankfurter business and becoming top salesman for his wife Dolly's father. Owney, though, is haunted by his mother's having deserted him at age nine and leaving him with his sick father. Twenty years later his mother (``Her eyes were like Delft dinner plates on a snowfield'') discovers him at a racetrack and recognizes him instantly as her son. She's now Oona Noon, who's inherited her late husband's 72 oil tankers that were used to haul cocaine for the Medell�n/Prizzi combo, has billions (tax-free) laundered away in Prizzi's banks, and now wants to sell her supertankers to the Chinese to finance her new idiot husband's run for the presidency. She hires Owney, who still doesn't know she's the mother he's been seeking, to be her well-paid messenger boy. But Owney's singing wife Dolly suddenly has a hit record, is making $43 million a year, and he's vastly embarrassed to be making less. When Oona sells her tankers to the Prizzis, not to the Chinese, her world momentarily collapses and Owney winds up with $4.3 billion in tax-free bearer bonds. Then Oona wants Owney to be her husband's vice-president, and Condon has a joyride with the candidates' duplicities with a stupefied public. A richly memorable high point is Dolly's climactic meeting with Oona (who is wearing a demure chinchilla body stocking), and the two women's comparisons of the world's wealthiest ladies' restrooms. Mind-boggling detail for skulduggery, and great fun. The ``final addiction'' is to the public's stupidity. -- Copyright �1991, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

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