Callahan's Key (Bantam Spectra Book)
What's Jake Stonebender's standard fee for saving the universe? That's  easy: "A bar, and enough money and clout to run it." It's time for Jake to save  the day yet again, with a lot of help from the rest of his pun-happy, cosmically  strange crew. And no more kiddie stakes like in theprevious Callahan books, when mere  humanity was on the line. Nope, Jake needs to save the totality of the universe.  From, of all things, the quest for knowledge. What does that mean? Well, it's  got something to do with a classified satellite called the Deathstar, a  hurricane named Erin, a superenergetic cosmic ray in the wrong place at the  wrong time, the Soviet space station Mir, and a shamelessly enormous volume of  Irish coffee. But as any Callahan fan will duly attest, all of this is really  beside the point.Books in this series (this one included) showcase the Münchhausen-style  storytelling skills of Nebula- and Hugo-winner Spider Robinson. Putting one of  cinema's most robust tropes into service--calling the team back together,  à laOceans 11--and doing a bang-up job at it as usual, Robinson  should please old fans and win new ones. If nothing else, you'll surely come to  love the eclectic cast of dozens, including everybody from a talking baby  (Jake's teleporting, superhacker daughter) to a talking German shepherd (Ralph  Von Wau Wau) to--why not?--the forgotten father of the 20th century, Nikola  Tesla.--Paul Hughes