ABOUT THE BOOK

For nearly a year Bernie Rhodenbarr has gone straight..well of a fashion. But Bernie has a new landlord for his Greenwich Village bookstore - Bernie Stoppelagard - not a nice man, who wants to increase his rent by $10,000..a month! Desperate times call for desperate measures. So Bernie is back to work burgling an apartment of a couple on a European tour of untraceable cash. There is only one problem - the naked man in the bathroom - and the fact that he is deceased. At the same time the apartment of Stoppelgard's brother-in-law has been relieved of a million dollar baseball card collection and somehow Bernie is being blamed (read: framed) for that crime. Mix in a mysterious woman and a crotchety old New York policeman and Bernie seems in big trouble. So what's the answer...Find the baseball cards....and steal them back.

CRITICAL ACCLAIM

"Bernie Rhodenbarr doesn't have to try for hipness, because hip is in the very air he breathes. The Burglar is just adorable. He is cute without being cuddly, he is witty without looking like he's striving for it, and he is rakish without possessing a single mean streak in his lithe and sinuous body. And his language - I suppose we should say Lawrence Block's language - is dry and droll and elegant, like how Dashiell Hammett would write if he was still doing the Thin Man books today." - The Guardian

"For clean close-to-the-bone prose, the line goes from Dashiell Hammett to James M Cain to Lawrence Block. He's that good." - Martin Cruz Smith

"Fast, Funny, Terrific" - Ed McBain

"An incorrigibly adorable thief" - New York Times

"Excellent N.Y. background and unusual characters make Block a detective writer to savour" - London Daily Mirror