Mortal Nuts: A Novel

by Pete Hautman

Overview

Pete Hautman, the acclaimed author of Drawing Dead and Short Money, returns with his funniest, fastest, most irresistible thriller yet with the story of seventy-three-year-old Axel Speeter and his final winner-takes-all gamble with a pair of crooks after his life savings.

With his cross-country poker-playing days closing, Axel Speeter has his affairs in order and is ready to settle down. He owns a taco concession at the Minnesota State Fair, and keeps his sometimes lover, Sophie Roman, and her spectacularly endowed daughter, Carmen, on the payroll. He’s made a nice home for himself at the Motel 6 six, where he holds his stash of $260,000 in seven coffee cans scattered around the room.

But when Carmen gets a new guy in her life, a skinhead ex-convict named James Dean, the two of them decide they want a piece of Axel’s stash. They may not be the smartest couple around, but how tough can it be to take a few coffee cans away from an old guy?

Carmen and James are in for a surprise, though, as they learn Axel’s got one more hand to play—and the loser pays with his life.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781476747972
Publisher:	Gallery Books
Publication date:	04/06/2013
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	320
Product dimensions:	5.00(w) x 8.00(h) x 0.90(d)

About the Author

Pete Hautman is the author of National Book Award–winning novel Godless, Sweetblood, Hole in the Sky, Stone Cold, The Flinkwater Factor, The Forgetting Machine, and Mr. Was, which was nominated for an Edgar Award by the Mystery Writers of America, as well as several adult novels. He lives in Minnesota and Wisconsin. Visit him at PeteHautman.com.

Editorial Reviews

Carl Hiaasen and Elmore Leonard fans who have yet to discover Hautman's wryly comic, warmly human characters and madcap plots are in for a treat. Septuagenarian Axel Speeter, former roving gambler, now star taco entrepreneur at the annual Minnesota State Fair, lives at the Motel 6 despite having squirreled away $260,000 in cold cash inside coffee cans. Bucking the doubts of two pals from his swashbuckling gambling days-auto mechanic and junkyard proprietor Sam O'Gara (returning from Hautman's Drawing Dead and Short Money) and pint-sized Tommy Fabian, the fair's mini-donut king-the sentimental but streetwise and ever-libidinous Axel sends for Carmen, the sexy daughter of his mistress and business manager. Carmen, a med-tech student in Omaha, may be wild and possessed of a larcenous heart, but Axel knows that she sells tacos like no one else. Following her to the fair this year, however, is her skinhead lover and drug-dealer, Valium-hooked ex-con James Dean, who plans to steal Axel's coffee cans and head for Baja. When he can't find Axel's cache, Dean's interest turns to the midget donut king and his stash of cash. Mayhem ensues, inevitably. This is about as offbeat as a comic crime novel can get, and entertaining enough to win Hautman a whole passel of new admirers. (June)

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

In the latest from the author of Short Money (S. & S., 1995), 73-year-old Axel Speeter runs a popular taco stand at the Minnesota State Fair, lives at the Motel 6, and stashes his loot in coffee cans. His part-time lover, Sophie, and her curvaceous daughter, Carmen, run the concession, while Carmen's ex-con lover contemplates the theft of Axel's fortune. Idiosyncratic characters bounce off each other against colorful backdrops. Crisp, solid, and dryly humorous, this is highly recommended. [Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 2/15/96.]

Library Journal

Another riotous carnival of larcenous fun à la Elmore Leonard—this time set in and around a real carnival.

Taco tycoon Axel Speeter, who doesn't like banks, keeps his fortune in Folgers—$260,000 in seven coffee cans, to be precise. Sophie Roman, newly promoted to manager of Axel's Taco Shop, doesn't know about it, but her footloose daughter Carmen does, and soon so do Carmen's boyfriend James Dean and his new skinhead friends, Tigger (the little, dumb one), Sweety (the big, even dumber one), and Pork (their pumped-up crank connection). All Axel wants to do is max out his take at the Minnesota State Fair; all Carmen, an aspiring nurse, wants to do is dose herself with bigger and bigger hits of Valium—at least until she samples the crank; all Dean wants to do is plunge his arms up to the elbows in Axel's greasy greenbacks. While all are biding their time waiting for Hautman's hilariously overgalvanized plot to kick in, Axel reminisces about some long-ago hands of poker he played with his buddies Sam O'Gara, the human randomizer, and Tommy Fabian, the monarch of Tiny Tot Donuts; surprisingly capitalistic Sophie and increasingly brain-dead Carmen jockey for position at the taco counter; and Dean goes after Axel's buddy Tommy Fabian, of Tiny Tot Donuts, and spends a lot of time mangling bits from the John Donne book borrowed from the sister he killed back in Omaha. Even minor characters, like the Motel 6 night manager and the clotheshorse twinkie Axel's hired for the State Fair stint, share the tunnel-vision looniness, convinced, like Axel and Dean, that their ships are about to come in. Hautman (Short Money, 1995, etc.) provides pleasantly hallucinogenic dialogue that faithfully reflects the mixture of nonstop junk food, increasingly toxic drugs, and background noise from the Tilt-a-Whirl and the hog pens just outside the midway; the whole world vibrates, with each felonious dreamer always on the cusp of a carnival buzz.

Joyfully loony—as blissful as a ton of cotton candy.

Kirkus Reviews