Money for Nothing by Donald E. Westlake

 

I've heard of Westlake, but this is the first of his novels I remember reading. Turns out the good things I've heard about him are true. This novel is clever and witty, living comfortably on the border between goofy fun and deadly serious. I wouldn't say the plot is plausible, exactly, but the behavior of most of the characters mostly is. What happens is pretty much the consequences of a small moral/ethical slip, and things going wildly non-linear; to the extent there's a theme, that's mostly it.