If Alfred Hitchcock could remake Fargo, it might feel something like Carkeet's comic-absurd latest (after his memoir, Campus Sexpot). Denny Braintree, a writer for model train enthusiast mag The Fearless Modeler, is sidetracked when he wrecks his car while traveling home from an assignment in Vermont. Taken to a Montpelier hotel to spend the night before flying home to Chicago, he meets a drunken woman named Marge who promptly strips and slips into his Jacuzzi. After a quick condom run, Denny returns to find Marge missing. The next morning, two policemen show up at the airport looking for Denny, but they mistake him for a local named Homer Dumpling, who vanished from town three years ago. Denny, now the prime suspect in Marge's disappearance, returns to town as Homer and has a dodgy time fitting into his new role, but when Marge's body turns up and Homer becomes a suspect, Denny's new identity is no safer than his own. It's nutty and pushes the bounds of credulity, but the make or break is Denny: narcissistic, crude and in over his head, he's either charming or terminally annoying. (Mar.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

An ebullient middle-aged child who seems incapable of fixing his own breakfast hides his involvement in a suspicious death by a comically preposterous masquerade. Dennis Braintree's adventures in Vermont begin when his car runs off the road and into a ditch, leading him to hail passersby, "Welcome to my crash site!" He winds up at the Ethan Allen Motel in Montpelier, where blind hostess Betsy, whose rooms have been filled by a legislative session, sticks him first in a windowless cubby, then in the room vacated by Mort Shuler. It's here that he meets good-time girl Marge Plongeur, who makes herself at home in his Jacuzzi, sends him out for cigarettes and condoms and then vanishes after apparently swinging so hard from his chandelier that she brings it crashing down on his bed. Except that Marge hasn't just vanished; according to Nick and Lance, a pair of police officers Denny runs into at the airport, she's been pushed off the balcony by whoever rented the room and left footprints outside in the snow. That person, naturally, is Denny, and his goose would be cooked if Nick hadn't taken Denny for his old friend Homer Dumpling, Betsy's nephew, who spent the last three years in Florida. Denny, recently fired from his job at a magazine aimed at model-railroad buffs, sees no reason that he shouldn't accept the role that's just been handed to him, and Carkeet (The Error of Our Ways, 1997, etc.) moves heaven and earth to show how he can get away with the masquerade against all oddsmainly because Denny embraces each new obstacle as a challenge and never shows the slightest fear. Sooner or later, of course, this house of cards has to come tumbling down, but Carkeet's Candide is so winning and his plotting so deft that the day of reckoning is as graceful as the moment when the juggler catches all five balls without missing a beat. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Crime-fiction authors toil relentlessly to create new heroes and subgenres, but Carkeet seems to have found something wholly new the antic mind of willful writer and model-railroad aficionado Denny Braintree. Stranded in Montpelier, Vermont, by a late-winter car crash, Denny botches a one-night stand before realizing that people in town think he's Homer Dumpling, who disappeared from Montpelier three years before. Sliding into Homer's life and home, Denny is untroubled by being fired from his job at The Fearless Modeler magazine and little troubled by being the prime suspect in the death of the woman he failed to bed. There's a crime here that Denny must solve, but Carkeet is much more interested in character Denny's and Homer's. Denny recalls a less-operatic version of Ignatius O'Reilly from A Confederacy of Dunces, and his gift for saying the wrong thing generates much of the book's humor. The very unwillful Homer is sad, soulful, and affecting. Recommend this one to crime fans looking for something new.--Gaughan, Thomas Copyright 2010 Booklist