A Long Walk up the Water Slide

by Don Winslow Narrated by Joe Barrett

Overview

30th Anniversary Edition with a new introduction by the author

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 hit man, 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.

Editorial Reviews

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

Elmore Leonard meets Professor Higgins in Winslow's (Way Down on the High Lonely) latest high-spirited Neal Carey caper. Neal agrees to hide big-haired Brooklyn gal Polly Paget from the media and other predators after she publicly accuses her former boss and lover, family-TV personality Jack Landis, of rape. Once again in the hire of the secret Friends of the Family organization, Neal and his lady love, Karen Hawley, agree to smooth some of Polly's rough edges before she reenters the public eye. Landis, his prim co-star/wife Candy and their investors (some of whom are less than legitimate), who are poised to expand the Landis communications empire into a family theme park, are leery of ugly publicity. The missing woman is hunted by assorted parties: a magazine publisher out for a high-profile centerfold sends a drunken investigator after her; the Landises hire a former government agent to find her; and someone else has called upon the services of a coolly competent hired gun. After assorted cast members converge at the Carey home in Austin, Tex., Neal, Karen, Polly and an unexpected new friend run for cover. Winslow's dialogue zips along as smartly as the action. If Polly becomes less interesting as her diction improves, the rewards of this tale, whose lowlife characters rival the cast of Guys and Dolls, remain undiminished. (Nov.)

Washington Post

Joe Barrett’s narration is excellently hard-boiled and his characters aptly voiced: Neal is superbly exasperated; Polly, steel-cored ditzy; the wise guys, an amalgam of dopiness and menace; the boozy detective is flummoxed; and the upper-crust lawyer is fatuousness itself.”

Product Details

BN ID:	2940178238554
Publisher:	Blackstone Audio, Inc.
Publication date:	11/21/2023
Series:	The Neal Carey Mysteries , #4
Edition description:	Unabridged

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