Outside of a Dog: Kate Nepveu's Book Log

A quick catch-up post: What's So Funny? is Donald E. Westlake's most recent Dortmunder novel, which is not longer that recent because this post got stuck behind quite a lot of other things.

This isn't a great Dortmunder book, but it isn't a brain-eaten one, either. An ex-cop blackmails Dortmunder into "retrieving" a very fancy, very heavy chess set currently locked in a bank vault while various rich people fight over it. Though it's not action-packed, it has a particularly excellent Dortmunder moment late in the book, good contributions from the two newest recurring characters, and a portrait of life in a big law firm whose accuracy I can't vouch for but that I enjoyed in a schadenfreude kind of way. Add in Westlake's usual sentence-level craft, and I'm a satisfied reader.