The Sunday Macaroni Club by
Steve Lopez
pbk out June 98
(No Exit Press)
at £5.99
The Steve Lopez offering is a comic crime novel with a strong cast of characters, set in Pennsylvania. The Macaroni Club of the title is a bunch of ancient retrogrades, something like the characters in Last of the Summer Wine, if you can imagine them all being tainted with evil and transported to an urban conurbation. The good guys are Mike Muldoon, an ex FBI agent who's been dragged out of retirement to squash the 'Club', and Assistant DA Lisa Savitch, who is the sexiest woman in the commonwealth.
The story is about how far the good guys will be successful in nailing the Sunday Macaroni Club, and to what lengths the members of the Sunday Macaroni Club will go to hang onto their political power base.
The result is really very funny, but in order to get to the laughs you have to plough through a mountain of turgid prose and inconsequential detail. By the time I got to the end I was wondering if it had been worth the effort.
(
John Baker
- author of the Sam Turner mysteries and one of Britain's most highly acclaimed writers)
The Sunday Macaroni Club by
Steve Lopez