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VOODOO, LTD. by Ross Thomas

VOODOO, LTD.

by Ross Thomas

Pub Date: Oct. 1st, 1992
ISBN: 0-89296-451-0

Artie Wu and Quincy Durant, the principal soldiers-of-fortune in WuDu, Ltd. (Out on the Rim, 1987), are called in to mop up the mess when Hollywood star Ione Gamble is accused of killing her sometime producer/fiancÇ Billy Rice. Gamble's go-between, Enno Glimm, doesn't expect Wu and Durant to vindicate his client legally; he wants them to track down a pair of fly-by-night hypnotherapists who promised to find out whether Gamble could remember anything about the fatal New Year's Eve without reporting directly back to the police. Now they've skedaddled with every indication of having made incriminating videotapes of Gamble revealing all under hypnosis—tapes they're willing to peddle either to Gamble or to the highest-bidding tabloid. Assembling a team that includes aging spymaster Booth Stallings, con man Maurice ``Otherguy'' Overby, and former Secret Service agent Georgia Blue, just getting sprung from a Manila prison, Wu and Durant head out to Malibu and flex their tentacles: Stallings and Blue rent Rice's beach house; Wu puts Gamble into another trance; Otherguy puts out the word that he's looking for nasty videotapes; and the team rents innumerable plush autos they drive to motels where they discover more corpses and predict a final calamity that somehow never arrives. The effortless expertise of WuDu is all a little foolish, of course, but it's hard not to devour the whole outlandish tale at a sitting with a contented smile. Murder, blackmail, double-crossing galore—it all adds up to a delightfully relaxed canter around WuDu's track.