REVIEWED BY BARRY GARDNER:

   

KINKY FRIEDMAN – The Love Song of J. Edgar Hoover.  The Kinkster #9, Simon & Schuster,  hardcover, 1996. Ballantine, paperback, 1997.

   Reviewing Kinky Friedman is a tough row to hoe. So much of his appeal is in the flavor, and flavors are about as hard to describe with words as emotions. You’ve just got to taste it know if you like it

   Kinky’s problems begin when a woman comes to him with a tale of a missing husband she wants him to find. She was referred to him by a friend, and being at loose ends, as he generally is, he decides to see what he can do. He finds that she’s involved in unexpected ways with more than one of his friends, and that the real story is both elusive and complex. Before it’s over, he’s been shot at in Washington, set on fire in Chicago, and confused everywhere.

   What can I say? Nothing I haven’t said before, I’m sure. If you like Friedman’s books, you like them for his thoroughly  irreverent and politically incorrect attitude, and his wry, telling, and amusing way with one-liners and aphorisms. The man is stone funny, or at least is to me; I know people who can’t abide him in the smallest of doses.

   His plots more often than not aren’t , or at best are farcical. You don’t read Kinky for plots. You read him for characters, and his books are filled with colorful ones. I go back to what I started with: you just have to try him and see.

— Reprinted from Ah Sweet Mysteries #26, July 1996.