Spanish Fly Preloaded Digital Audio Player – Unabridged, 1 Feb. 2010

A beautifully written, compelling novel about con artists in the 1930s and 40s. The historical research is thorough and fascinatingly presented as part of the narrative, and the characters sympathetically drawn, especially the narrator, who has the brain but not the heart of a con man - a young man of many talents, but no pretensions. One of the most compelling elements of the book is the description of the various types of con tricks, but it is the people playing them who stay with you. The sense of place is strong too: you can almost smell the dust of the poor towns of the southern United States in the mid-20th century. Very highly recommended: a real pleasure.

This is a marvellous road trip novel, set in the 1930s, detailing the exploits of Virgil and Miss Rose who, in Paradise Flats, a back-of-beyond town in the mid-West, make the acquaintance of young Jack Geary. Jack learned an early lesson at the hands of his father, who sold almost all his possessions in the grip of a nation-wide scam that promised those investing in it a portion of the gold that Sir Francis Drake sent to the bottom of the ocean in the war with Spain. Jack is smart, puzzling over Pascal's wager in the library and learning even more in pursuit of the librarian's daughter. He is duped by carneys (carnival fraudsters) while trying to win a prize for his girlfriend, and then he meets up with Virgil and Miss Rose and takes off with them on a roller-coaster ride around the townships and misbegotten wayside stop-overs of the mid west of North America. Neither Miss Rose nor Virgil are who they purport to be - they are card-sharps, scam merchants and tricksters and a great deal of the novel features their exploits with all kinds of confidence tricks, including selling the proverbial Spanish Fly (labelled `Genuine Placebo' in a nice touch). But then comes the scam to beat all others and the trio are almost wiped out - a matter of dandelions on the lawn and a gum-chewing waitress who doesn't pick up her paycheck are what saves them. This book is genuinely funny as well as rather shocking, and the characterisation is uniformly good. It's an entertaining read and though the pace flags a little towards the last third, it ends on a high note and is well-worth the reader's persistence.