Bad News
Dortmunder • Book 10
by Donald E. Westlake, Unknown Author
Why You'll Love This
Only Westlake could make grave-robbing feel like the most reasonable career choice in the room.
- Great if you want: caper comedy where the scheme keeps hilariously compounding itself
- The experience: breezy and witty — reads fast, laughs come easy
- The writing: Westlake's comic timing is surgical — setups pay off perfectly
- Skip if: you haven't met Dortmunder — earlier books reward you more
About This Book
When a criminal mastermind asks John Dortmunder to dig up a grave — then swap one seventy-year-old set of remains for another — even Dortmunder's flexible moral compass hesitates. The scheme involves a Native American casino inheritance dispute, a complex web of impersonation, and the kind of baroque complications that only Westlake could dream up with a straight face. The stakes are modest, the cast of con artists is gloriously unreliable, and the whole enterprise teeters so cheerfully on the edge of disaster that you'll keep reading just to see what goes wrong next.
Ten books into the Dortmunder series, Westlake has his rhythm perfected — that dry, deadpan prose that somehow makes catastrophe feel inevitable and hilarious at once. The real pleasure here is structural: watching an elaborate scheme accrete layer upon layer of absurdity while each character pursues their own slightly incompatible agenda. Westlake never winks too hard or explains the joke. He trusts the reader, trusts his ensemble, and keeps the whole contraption moving with the confidence of a writer who knows exactly how far to push a ridiculous premise before everything beautifully collapses.