Product Description

An adventure novel about one man's impossible mission of revenge - to wipe out the whole trail of villains whose drug-dealing activities indirectly led to the death of his beloved only granddaughter.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #3521607 in Books
• Published on: 1991-04-29
• Original language: English
• Binding: Hardcover
• 280 pages

From Publishers Weekly
Buckley uneasily combines elements of the satirical comic caper and the action drama in this tale of a billionaire's personal vendetta against drug lords.
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal
Grandfathers with nothing to lose are the most dangerous avengers, argues Buckley, whose The White House Mess (Knopf, 1986) is still going strong. Here, armed with his puckish humor, and drawing on the milieu of drugs and insurgency, Buckley unleashes a formidable senior citizen's vengeance when his only grandchild dies of a cocaine overdose. After disposing of her domestic predators, the old geezer sets sail in his yacht for the Amazon, bent on eliminating the Peruvian drug lord in his jungle redoubt. Buckley subtly merges the sheer entertainment of a good travel yarn with the vicious motivations of greed to produce a story that deserves a strong recommendation.
- Barbara Conaty, Library of Congress
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Review
'Chris Buckley is America's top humourist' The Spectator 'Buckley subtly merges the sheer entertainment of a good travel yarn with the vicious motivations of greed to produce a story that deserves a strong recommendation' Library Journal 'Deftly plotted, precisely detailed, and remarkably funny... Wet Work is elegant entertainment' National Review

Customer Reviews

Imagine a cross between Tom Clancy and Tom McGuane
A simple premise ... a wealthy American businessman's only granddaugter dies of a cocaine overdose. He decides that he's going to kill everyone who had anything to do with it, starting with her boyfriend and ending with the head of the Columbian drug cartel. Along the way yachts are wrecked and burned, secret love affairs are revealed, priests are consulted, and plenty of smartass dialogue is emitted. Buckley obviously knows what really rich people are really like, and in addition to having a great plot and memorable charactes, it's full of consistently interesting observations. A good book

not his best
'In 1986, Architectural Digest asked me to do a piece on Malcolm Forbes's yacht, the Highlander,' the 38-year-old writer said in a telephone interview from his New York City office. Mr. Buckley said he learned that Forbes was planning a journey from Manaus, Brazil, to Iquitos, Peru, with the billionaire John Kluge. 'I was casting around for a book idea and thought, "There's one -- a comedy of manners about two billionaires going up the Amazon to the heart of darkness."' -Interview with Andrew Yarrow, NY Times Book Review

I suppose there's some sense in which it's unfair to hold an author's successes against him, but Christopher Buckley's other books are so good, that this one, though adequate, seems terribly disappointing. He's taken the scenario above and turned it into a kind of cross between A Man in Full and Death Wish. When billionaire industrialist Charlie Becker's beloved granddaughter Natasha dies of a drug overdose, he sets out to wreak his terrible revenge on the entire drug apparatus responsible for her death. By the end of the novel, he's, you guessed it, on board his yacht in the Amazon on pursuing a Peruvian cocaine kingpin.

There are many funny lines and the action is thrilling enough, though it does go on longer than it needs to. I suppose that if this was the first novel I'd read by Christopher Buckley I might be more lenient, but knowing how much better he's capable of, this one just gets the slightest of recommendations. Try Little Green Men or The White House Mess instead.

GRADE : C

Unfortunately - mediocre
I bought this book to see if my fond memories of C. Buckley which were jolted by his latest effort "Supreme Courtship" could be calmed and massaged.

This book started out like a fine walk in the woods and then got into somewhat muddy grounds and then a bit swampy and finally quicksand. Sorry. Three stars is the best I can do and I don't even feel that I want to justify it.