The Maltese Iguana by Tim Dorsey

 

This is another of this author's weird, completely gonzo novels, and it's got the standard toolkit: oddball violence; complicated, tangled storylines; lots of recreational drugs. The story here sort of pulls itself together, but it does so at best loosely. There are some gloriously hilarious turns of phrase, and some very satisfying bad ends for bad people; what pass for good people in this novel (it's a reasonable questions if any of the people in it are actually good) tend to survive and maybe thrive. These are decent as an occasional palate-cleanser, but I don't know that I want to try to keep track of which I've read, at least not for much longer.