Good Behavior
A Dortmunder Novel

After a couple of weeks of expensive home repairs, tornado sirens regularly wailing in the background and reading Emma Donoghue’s excellent but ultra-depressing Room, I really needed a laugh. Fortunately, I had a Donald Westlake Dortmunder novel I hadn’t read yet mounted in a glass box on the wall w......more

I've been a big fan of Mr. Westlake's noirish "Parker" series he writes under the Richard Stark pseudonym for years. I've been meaning to try his Dortmunder series, so I took the plunge with reading Good Behavior. John Dortmunder and his motley crew are professional thieves who this time get mixed u......more

The perfect read for these troubled times, honestly. This is an especially fun Dortmunder installment (that loses that fifth star only because there are a few plot threads that seem to bob up and then disappear without garnering enough laughs first). When one of poor Dortmunder's attempted robberies......more

The premise and set up are fine, but the third act is wacky, and not in a good, structured Marx brothers way - more in a 'the editor dropped the pages on deadline, didn't find them all, and put them together wrong' way.......more

Fun, fluffy, maybe over-long, but a great conceit and good-humored. It reads like the treatment for a movie, which is actually kind of nice.......more