Review: This book rocks!
Rating: 5 out of 5
Date: 02 15, 2012
This book gave me an evening of pure entertainment.It's full of formatting glitches and a typo or two, but most of time I was so busy laughing I breezed right on by. Elvis isn't really dead; he's in a witness protection program. When he bounds onstage to perform at an Elvis Impersonators show my computer rocks.Funny though it is, SUSPICIOUS MINDS is a crime novel and Paul Bishop has the bona fides for it. He spent 35 years with the Los Angeles PD, twice winning Detective of the Year awards.A prolific writer of novels and film scripts, Bishop also co-starred as a regular interrogator on the ABC-TV reality show, "Take The Money And Run," which wrapped its first season this past September.SUSPICIOUS MINDS,the story --March 1977, New Orleans, St. Louis Cemetery No. 2: Gordy Fontaine and Lew Sutton, DEA partners, show up for the burial of drug dealer Zachary Arceneaux. Trouble is, there's someone else in the coffin, while Arceneaux, guarded by two FBI agents, sits in a limousine watching his own funeral.As the coffin is lowered, Gordy jumps on top of it and unscrews the lid, revealing the wrong corpse. The traditional jazz band strikes up like all heck breaking loose and in the melee an FBI agent is shot in the leg. It's a wild shot from the limo but Gordy gets the blame and goes on the lam.June 1977, an arena in Indianapolis: Gordy buys a ticket to an Elvis concert. They've been friends ever since Elvis showed up at a DEA office wanting to help in the war on drugs. Gordy meets Elvis in his limo after the concert. The wheels begin to turn.August 1977, Graceland, Memphis: Outside the Graceland gates, a man runs through a crowd of weeping mourners yelling that Elvis is not dead; it's a hoax. Nobody pays him any attention. Of course Elvis is dead. It was on radio and TV.April 1996, West Hollywood, California: Cole Ramsey, a popular Elvis impersonator, gets a call from his sister, Joella, a deputy at West Hollywood Station. She wants him to find a safe place for a straggler who claims to be Elvis Presley. He looks like death warmed over and is asking for a DEA detective named Gordon Fontaine. He has no ID and there's no DEA agent named Gordon Fontaine, but there is something about the straggler ... if Cole would just check him out ...Cole is a talented and affable young man with many friends. He calls in some favors that lead him to a sanitarium. So far, so good, but it's a set-up, and the chase is on. Gordy Fontaine has that evil old thug Zachary Arceneaux in his sights. And Elvis ... well, that would be telling. The ending is a pip.