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Donald E. Westlake

Nobody's Perfect

An art collector hires Dortmunder to steal one of his own paintings.
It would take a miracle to keep Dortmunder out of jail. Though he cased the electronics store perfectly, the cops surprised him, turning up in the alley just as he was walking out the back door, a television in each hand. Already a two-time loser, without divine intervention he faces a long stretch inside. Then God sends J. Radcliffe Stonewiler, a celebrity lawyer who gets Dortmunder off with hardly any effort at all.
Stonewiler was sent by Arnold Chauncey, an art lover with a cash flow problem. He asks the thief to break into his house and make off with a valuable painting in exchange for a quarter of the insurance money. Chauncey has pulled the stunt twice before, so it must look real. He'll give Dortmunder no inside help — a shame since, when this caper spins out of control, he'll need all the help he can get.

249 printed pages
Copyright owner
Head of Zeus
Publication year
2014
Have you already read it? How did you like it?
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Impressions

  • Payal Vaishnavshared an impression9 years ago
    🎯Worthwhile

    The story is quite interesting, the plot is good, the introductory chapter is totally different from what the book is about. Although an interesting book, the painting being stolen again and again, is weird and the lesson learnt of course is people can change sides for money at any point of time. The ending is obvious that all of them lead a prison term but the book tells about how insurance companies are fraud all over.

  • b6638036821shared an impression2 years ago
    👍Worth reading
    💞Loved Up

  • b0382597863shared an impression9 years ago
    👍Worth reading
    🚀Unputdownable

Quotes

  • Riad Ramadanhas quoted9 months ago
    Dortmunder slumped on the hard wooden chair, watching his attorney try to open a black attaché case. Two little catches were supposed to release when two bright buttons were pressed, but neither of them worked. In other cubicles all around this one, defendants and their court-appointed attorneys murmured together, structuring threadbare alibis, useless mitigations, attenuated extenuations, mathematically questionable plea bargains, chimerical denials and hopeless appeals to the mercy of the court, but in this cubicle, with its institutional green walls, its black linoleum floor, the great hanging globe of light, the frosted-glass window in its door, its battered wooden table and two battered wooden chairs and one battered metal waste-basket, nothing was happening at all, except that the attorney assigned to Dortmunder by an uncaring court and a malevolent fate couldn’t get his goddam attaché case open. “Just a—” he muttered. “It’s always a—I don’t know why it—I’ll—It’s just a—”
    Dortmunder shouldn’t have been here at all, of course, waiting for his preliminary hearing on several hundred counts of burglary and knowing he was merely the victim of another accident of fate. Two weeks, two solid weeks, he’d cased that TV repair shop—he’d even brought in a perfectly good Sony table model and let them charge him for six new tubes and nine hours’ labor—and not once had any police patrol gone down the alley behind the row of stores. A prowl car cruised past the front from time to time, but that was all. And the cops were definitely never there when the pornographic movie house around the corner let out; at those moments they were always parked across the street from the theater, glaring through their windshield as the patrons came slinking past, as though their moral disapproval would somehow make up for their legal inef
  • Рыба По-итальянскиhas quoted9 years ago
    “I could also use some relief,”

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