Not his best ( )

Long and boring and has lots of bad computer stuff that's aged worse than yer grandma who spent a lifetime smoking two packs a day and exclusively drinking whiskey. ( )

My fifth Dortmunder book! He and the gang are after a coffin full of money - in a reservoir, under fifty feet of water! And, believe it or not, they didn't get it on their first attempt! Or second. Or...

LOVED the subplot of Bob, the young fella who works at the damn! The poor guy! Lol!
I also loved (as I have in other Dortmunder books) Andy Kelp’s penchant for stealing cars with MD plates! And finally I loved that in this book, Dortmunder believes that the reservoir is trying to kill him! Believes that, and actually fears that it is so! So crazy! The book is just a crazy, funny bunch of characters trying to do something that they really can't do! Fun to read! And funny ending too! ( )

Apparently there is a whole series of "Dortmunder" books and this isn't the first. It's a mildly amusing crime caper novel, in which Dortmunder is the brains (allegedly) for the underwater salvage of a recently released psycho's spoils from an armed robbery. It would have been a lot better, though, if not for the computer geek and his computer. The book was published in 1990 and the PC was still pretty new-fangled (the first time I used one was only the year before). The computer geek as comedic butt is not so much the problem (but more on that later) as the enormous length of time spent describing the PC and how it works, what you can do with it (play Donkey Kong, for instance), which nobody needs these days, only to be followed by a bunch of highly unrealistic uses and responses from it. (It's as if there's a mind in there that can talk back to the user). It's dated as well as crass.

If you can leave that aside, the rest of it is amusing, particularly the ironic ending, but it's hard to do as the PC takes up far to much space in the book and just when you think you're permanently done with it, it makes a come-back. I suspect that other Dortmunder novels, with no PC obsessions evident might be better than this one.

Back to the computer geek: It's a species that's going extinct. This is because knowing heaps about computers is not the preserve of socially inept obsessives any more. The younger the generation the more computer knowledge is ubiquitous and unremarkable. Electronic computing pervades life now and the people who have grown up in that environment take it for granted. It is normal and familar. The people who know most about it, far from being social pariahs by assumption are celebrated. So the computer geek as comic butt is a concept that is dating rapidly. Other socially inept geeks are replacing them. ( )

the money is underwater and 4 tries for it only get Dort wet and mad, usual high quality