The Burglar Who Liked to Quote Kipling (Bernie Rhodenbarr, #3) (ePub)

"Block is a master of witty dialogue, plotting and pace, and the series' wacky, offbeat characters make great companions." -Cleveland Plain-Dealer "Fans will welcome it. New readers will delight in it. A witty, and always affectionate, sendup of the genre." -Denver Post "Clever and amusing." -Detroit Free Press "Wittily diverting…rather like an Agatha Christie novel narrated by Basil Fawlty, or a game of Clue organized by Monty Python." -Entertainment Weekly "Block peoples his mystery with a wacky cast of characters who all happen to have a knack for snappy dialogue, the wackiest and snappiest being Bernie himself, of course." -Florida Times-Union "Rhodenbarr is one of the slickest characters in crime, and Block…one of the most talented writers." -Houston Chronicle "…you'd rather be stranded on a desert island with [Bernie Rhodenbarr] than with any other detective in fiction." -Kirkus Reviews "In his Matthew Scudder books, Block is one of the most serious of crime novelists. When he chronicles Bernie…Block is one of the funniest…[Bernie] is enough to give burglary a good name." -Los Angeles Times

Bernie Rhodenbarr has gone legit -- almost -- as the new owner of a used bookstore in New York's Greenwich Village. Of course, dusty old tomes don't always turn a profit, so to make ends meet, Bernie's forced, on occasion, to indulge in his previous occupation: burglary. Besides which, he likes it.

Now a collector is offering Bernie an opportunity to combine his twin passions by stealing a very rare and very bad book-length poem from a rich man's library.

The heist goes off without a hitch. The delivery of the ill-gotten volume, however, is a different story. Drugged by the client's female go-between, Bernie wakes up in her apartment to find the book gone, the lady dead, a smoking gun in his hand, and the cops at the door. And suddenly he's got to extricate himself from a rather sticky real-life murder mystery and find a killer -- before he's booked for Murder One.