A LONG WALK UP THE WATER SLIDE

Summary: Neal Carey has to keep the mob, the FBI, and a major television personality from killing his newest client, but he's tempted to do the job himself. Sometime student and ever-reluctant detective Neal Carey would rather be finishing a dull doctoral thesis than staring down the nose of a loaded gun, but his new assignment doesn't sound dangerous. All he has to do is pull off the ultimate makeover: turn Polly Paget, a gum-chewing, foul-mouthed, big-haired broad, into a perfect lady in time to testify in a rape case against Jack Landis, head of the Family Cable Network and America's most beloved family man. But, Polly isn't cooperating, and everyone (including a former FBI agent, an obsessive-compulsive hitman, the Mafia, a porn prince, and a slew of tabloid reporters) is on her trail, turning Neal's "simple" assignment into a deadly game of duck-duck-goose. In a hellish and hilarious escapade, that takes him from the deserts of Nevada to the bright lights of Las Vegas and finally to a hair-raising climax in a shoddily built amusement park, Neal tries to escape the mob's big guns while taking a slippery walk up the world's biggest water slide. "All parties concerned scramble to come out on top in a final tarantella worthy of Donald Westlake...The broadest, loosest, and funniest of the Neal Carey series." "Elmore Leonard meets Professor Higgins in Winslow's latest high-spirited Neal Carey caper...Winslow's dialogue zips along as smartly as the action."