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Hardcover:
ISBN: 0-8095-5799-1
Price $29.95, 184 pp

Damien Broderick & Rory Barnes
I SUPPOSE A ROOT'S OUT OF THE QUESTION?

R. Doubting Thomas Perdue (Tom to his scuzzy mates) is in trouble, and it can only get worse. Tom’s Feng shui scam implodes when his Sicilian brother-in-law Mauricio drives a Mack truck through his tasteful office. Someone knows about his racehorse-doping past. His beautiful wife has made a 10-year vow of celibacy to the Virgin Mary. His daughter Animal’s grrlfriend’s obese sister has vanished, extremely foul play suspected. Meanwhile, an unusual camel called Nile Fever has become an animal of interest to the Australian Federal Police, and Tom is up to his neck in the middle of the mess. And he’s fairly sure that a root is completely out of the question, poor bastard.*

Award-winning Aussie novelists Damien Broderick and Rory Barnes have collaborated on six previous books. This is their first crime novel, a blackly comic confection that blends hilarity with wild pace.

Paul Di Filippo called their previous novel “one of the most satisfying romps in a long time... Stylistically slick, relentlessly zooming forward so fast it catches up with its own tail, it will leave you gob-smacked.”

*rooted: Irrevocably broken. As in: “Your hard drive is rooted, mate. Need to get a new one.” Root also means “to have sex.”

BIOGRAPHY
Damien Broderick met up with Rory Barnes (who'd learned to walk and talk in a tribal mudhut in Northern Rhodesia) more than 40 years ago at Australia's Monash University. They shared various student houses with a motley crew of would-be writers who did what student s did in the 60s: got pissed, rooted around, smoked some pot, engaged in a small amount of semi-violent protest and wrote a lot of essays. Broderick sold some stories and books and eventually got a PhD, Barnes did some teaching then wandered around Southeast Asia and the Middle East. Since 1983, they have co-authored five novels.

Barnes lives with his wife Annie and two sons in Adelaide, South Australia. Broderick shares several houses with his American wife Barbara in Melbourne, Victoria, and San Antonio and Lockhart, Texas. They are both far more law-abiding than their raffish hero, to their regret.