From Away
A Novel
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3.5 • 2 Ratings
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
“If Alfred Hitchcock could remake Fargo, it might feel something like Carkeet’s comic-absurd latest” (Publishers Weekly).
Denny Braintree, a wisecracking loner devoted to model trains, has found himself stranded in Vermont. His night at the hotel begins promisingly—until his prospective one-night stand walks out on him.
As he prepares to leave town, someone mistakes Denny for Homer Dumpling—a local man who mysteriously disappeared three years earlier, and who apparently looks a whole lot like Denny. Instead of correcting the mistake, Denny slips into his new identity as easily as a winter fleece. And it’s a good thing too, because the woman he’d hoped to sleep with has turned up dead, and the chief suspect is the out-of-towner who was pursuing her at the hotel . . .
As Denny tries to unravel the mystery, he struggles to hide his true identity from Homer’s increasingly suspicious circle of family and friends, including Homer’s prickly girlfriend. The adventures of this fast-talking bumbler as his survival instincts are put to the test make for a rollicking novel by an author who has produced “some of the funniest writing since Mark Twain” (Jonathan Kellerman, New York Times–bestselling author of Night Moves).
“A deftly funny book.” —Carl Hiaasen
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
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.
