In typical Brian Doyle (Mink River) style, these stories invite you to clamber aboard and enjoy the ride. In the title story we learn that Bin Laden has (had) a bald spot shaped just like Iceland, including the Vestfjarda Peninsula to the west. His barber imparts this information along with a description of going to the "cave complex every Wednesday for haircuts," and watching Bin Laden, obsessed with his video appearances, get ready for his next performance. Later in the book, in "Pinching Bernie," he takes on Bernard Francis Cardinal Law. While Archbishop of Boston, Law "kept shuffling the rapists around from job to job and denying everything while they were raping kids in sacristies and chapels and hospital rooms and classrooms and basements and cellars and billiard rooms and rectories...." Doyle has his way with these two criminals, clearly reminding the reader how despicable they are.
All 25 stories are filled with great voices, great moments and odd happenings: the man who was born on a Greyhound bus and eventually bought the company; Joseph Kennedy, telling all to a golf course bartender just minutes before the stroke that rendered him speechless; a man who takes up running to try to forget that his wife is having an affair and discovers that all the other runners on the street are also cuckolds. This is vintage Doyle, and it doesn't get much better. --Valerie Ryan, Cannon Beach Book Company, Ore.