Bird Dog **EDGAR AWARD FINALIST**

When Harold Dodge agrees to help gorgeous Marianna Perado get out of a rip-off deal at Joe Covo's dealership, he suddenly lands himself in a mess of trouble, involving ruthless repo men, fast-talking salesmen, the FBI, criminal intrigue, and murder. A first novel.

If Elmore Leonard wrote about California car salesmen, he'd produce something like this fast and funny first novel. Marianna Perado, a Guatemalan secretary at Aerodyne, is sure she's been taken to the cleaners by smooth-talking Vito Fiorre at Joe Covo's Matsura dealership. She wants her 1982 Escort back, and since Vito doesn't look like he's about to cave in, she goes for help to Aerodyne engineer Harold Dodge, who once wrote How to Buy a Cream Puff but now spends his time taking long lunch hours and squeezing a therapy ball in his pocket to reduce tension. But Vito brushes Harold off with empty promises, and when Marianna goes back to pick up the Escort, Vito tells her it's gone, sold, out of the picture. It isn't, of course; it's sitting in his daughter's driveway, and when Marianna, returning from a date she's decoyed Vito into, sees it, she grabs it, along with some paperwork that could prove very embarrassing not only to Vito but to Joe Covo and Joe's national suppliers, if the Division of Motor Vehicles ever looked into it. Now Marianna's private feud with Vito--think of Laurel and Hardy molded together as a Latina sexpot--explodes into a full-scale war. It's not just Vito who's after Marianna (he's already repo'd the Escort, but hasn't got the little black book), but Covo, the big boys from back east, and their hired guns. And she's not the only one they're looking for: Harold Dodge is slowly making his way to the top of their list. Can things get any worse for good-Samaritan Harold? Not unless he runs afoul of the LAPD because of the dead body in his trunk--a body that's not even the body he thinks it is. (Harold's thoughtful rumination on this last problem: ``No one deserved to die like this. Not even a car salesman.'') A high-speed bagatelle game that uses car salesmen for balls. -- Copyright ©1997, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Harold Dodge used to work as a "bird dog" for a car dealership, luring in easy marks for the salesmen, but the business got to him. Now he's a chemical engineer for the dying aerospace industry, and the stress is eating him up. In walks colleague Marianna Perdado, a fiery Guatemalan in spiked heels, all worked up about being ripped off on the trade-in of her beloved Ford Escort, and she wants Harold to help her unwind the deal. Against his better judgment, Harold decides to help her out, and his stress level is soon floating up there in the jet stream. Marianna's idea of getting even with the lizard-lipped salesman who ripped her off involves a hit-and-run and grand theft auto. Harold and Marianna end up ducking car salesmen, the DMV, and the police--and Marianna still wants the pink slip for her Escort. This is a sometimes gritty, slightly loopy novel that expertly plays on our nation's love affair with cars and greed. Joanne Wilkinson

This jaunty, humorous, and captivating first novel features a cast of quirky California characters and their misadventures. Lush-bodied Marianna picks on middle-aged co-worker Harold?who wrote a tell-all book about used cars?for help when a car salesman cheats her. Thus begins an itinerant tale of scam and counterscam, car distribution corruption, tender-hearted strippers, attempted murder, accidental murder, car chases, outwitted hoodlums, vituperative ex-wives, pot-smoking brothers, and incipient love. Quick shifts of scene steadily increase the suspense, but this is one of those books that ends too soon.
Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc.