Stuff Dreams Are Made Of

June 30, 2008
At the start of Bruns's talky second mystery to feature best friends Skip Moore and James Lessor (after 2007's Stuff to Die For
), the pair decide to make a buck by serving food to the attendees of a tent revival at Oleta River Park near Miami, Fla., led by charismatic Rev. Preston Cashdollar. Once on the job, Skip and James realize certain people associated with Cashdollar have met untimely ends. Particularly disturbing are two unsolved murders—that of Cabrina Washington, an African-American teen rumored to have had an affair with the married minister, and that of Fred Long, a conservative U.S. senator from North Dakota who angered Cashdollar. After Barry Romans, a right-wing talk-show host critical of Cashdollar, is shot, Skip and James turn amateur sleuths. Likable protagonists compensate in part for the thin, improbable plot.

July 1, 2008
Skip and James are proud graduates of Sam and Dave University. To no ones surprise but their own, they end up with dead-end jobs as a cook and a seller of security systems. In order to pay off their huge student-loan debt, they convert James pride and joy, a cube truck he bought with a $12,000 windfall, into a lunch wagon. In their last adventure (Stuff to Die For, 2007), they had hoped to strike it rich in the hauling business, but ultimately they were happy to escape with their lives from a gang of Cuban outlaws in Miamis Little Havana. This time their attempt to sell burgers at Reverend Cashdollars revival at a park fronting the Intracoastal Highway costs them thousands in after-hours poker games and burglaries from their peers, the motliest bunch of carnies to appear in a narrative since the 1930s movie Freaks. A murderer is lurking in the group, and James smokes out the bad guy by drinking him under the table. Bruns maintains a narrative tone that would have done Huck Finn proud in this combination Andy Hardy adventure and hard-boiled thriller.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2008, American Library Association.)