Good Grief

A comic crime caper in the tradition of Elmore Leonard or Donald E. Westlake's Dortmunder series. A more serious story in which mirth and message intermingle, more reminiscent of Carl Hiassen or Evelyn Waugh. That's Good Grief, which happens to be a real honest-to-goodness hamlet on Idaho's northern tip, but also what you'll be saying to yourself while turning the pages of this novel, where the characters are as complex and original as the plot.
It's 2016, and all seems quiet between Idaho and British Columbia. To the north, pot growers and pot smugglers. On the south side, preppers and pastors, and never the twain shall meet-except, that is, at the border-straddling Good Grief Golf Resort, every Sunday morning when the men's club plays. Sometimes, in fact, they play for keeps. The vulgar and dirty ex-cop who founded Idaho's biggest prepper depot and currently serves as local point man for Donald Trump's presidential campaign rats out a trio of polite and well-educated smugglers.
Vowing revenge and recompense, they devise a convoluted plan to trick him into funding a reality-television show, starring, of course, himself. Enlisted for the cause are an enterprising ex, recently returned from Los Angeles because her porn studio is floundering, and a hacker daughter who dawns braces to pose as a teen-age Valley Girl. Oh, and fourteen unemployed porn stars masquerading as a film crew.
Panhandle pandemonium is the result, out of which a TV show surprisingly emerges-as does an understanding of certain character traits shared by the prepper king and his beloved candidate. You'll laugh, all right. Until you cry.