The MORTAL NUTS

Rating:
Summary: Read this book!
Review: Absolutely the best combination of comedy and mystery that I have seen in a novel. The characters are like none you will ever read about anywhere else. A+ for Pete Hautman!

Rating:
Summary: Read this book!
Review: Absolutely the best combination of comedy and mystery that I have seen in a novel. The characters are like none you will ever read about anywhere else. A+ for Pete Hautman!

Rating:
Summary: Mortally funny...
Review: Axel Speeter seems weird by most people's standards, but he seems to have everything under control, and likes it just fine. He's lived in a room at a Motel 6 for as long as he can remember. He keeps all of his clothes and personal belongings in milk crates and Folger's coffee cans stacked along one wall. He mistrusts banks and his life savings of $266,000 can also be found in those coffee cans. He runs a taco concession at the Minnesota State Fair. And his surrogate family consists of one of his workers, and her college-age daughter.

In Richard Hautman's Mortal Nuts, things seem just swell until Carmen (Speeter's surrogate daughter and sometimes druggie college student) mentions to her ex-convict, Aryan Nation boyfriend that Speeter keeps large sums of cash in his room. This sets off a chain of events that start at the beginning of the fair and lasting the weekend and a half that the fair runs.

Hautman is a master at oddball characters, and there are more than enough of them in Mortal Nuts. It's also fun to see the workings of the Minnesota State Fair-from the food concessions and the freak shows, to the show animals and the rides. It truly is a world unknown to many readers, myself included.

This is my second Peter Hautman, and he continues to grow on me with each book I read.

Rating:
Summary: Mortally funny...
Review: Axel Speeter seems weird by most people's standards, but he seems to have everything under control, and likes it just fine. He's lived in a room at a Motel 6 for as long as he can remember. He keeps all of his clothes and personal belongings in milk crates and Folger's coffee cans stacked along one wall. He mistrusts banks and his life savings of $266,000 can also be found in those coffee cans. He runs a taco concession at the Minnesota State Fair. And his surrogate family consists of one of his workers, and her college-age daughter.

In Richard Hautman's Mortal Nuts, things seem just swell until Carmen (Speeter's surrogate daughter and sometimes druggie college student) mentions to her ex-convict, Aryan Nation boyfriend that Speeter keeps large sums of cash in his room. This sets off a chain of events that start at the beginning of the fair and lasting the weekend and a half that the fair runs.

Hautman is a master at oddball characters, and there are more than enough of them in Mortal Nuts. It's also fun to see the workings of the Minnesota State Fair-from the food concessions and the freak shows, to the show animals and the rides. It truly is a world unknown to many readers, myself included.

This is my second Peter Hautman, and he continues to grow on me with each book I read.

Rating:
Summary: Excellent! Good writing, charcters, plotting, etc.
Review: Hautman has a great way with flawed characters. He does them so well, in fact, it makes me wonder what sort of friends he has!

I also enjoyed the setting at a state fair. It brought back fond memories of the aromas and tastes of the deliciously junky food, the bizarre people, and the stomach churning rides. You can almost smell the trampled down grass and animal barns.

Rating:
Summary: run out of Hiaasens?
Review: In the carnival midway of literature, you'll find Pete Hautman somewhere between Raymond Chandler and Raymond Queneau, wandering from attraction to attraction in a half-serious scavenger hunt for zany characters and offbeat plot twists.

Set at the Minnesota State Fair, The Mortal Nuts features a calculatedly improbable dramatis personae: Axel Speeter, a surly septuagenarian with a cash fortune stuffed into coffee cans; his buddy, donut mogul Tommy Fabian; Sophie Roman, Axel's stand manager and sometime bedfellow; Carmen, her Valium-popping daughter; Carmen's skinhead beau, an ex-con by name of James Dean; and a motley montage of characters that only a fair could bring together.

Treating these characters like human balloon-animals, Hautman twists them into a believably unbelievable caper plot that's fluffily engaging - and shamelessly unprofound - from beginning to end.

The Mortal Nuts is like a day at the fair, eating junk food and people-watching: it's by turns lighthearted and sordid, violent and naive, cheesy and sincere, frivolous and satisfying. No meaning-of-life headaches here - just a colorful, entertaining diversion.


Rating:
Summary: These Nuts are First - Rate
Review: Pete Hautman's two leading characters, Axel & Sam, are wonderful. Nuts, to be sure, but so are the rest of the folks in this book. The descriptions of life in the carnival food service business are so rich as to make you want to try out the vocation yourself.

This is a quick, witty read that really IS hard to put down. Highly recommended.

Rating:
Summary: Minnesota State Fair high jinks
Review: Senior citizens hold sway in this funny, funny novel. Seventy-three-year-old Axel Speeter runs a taco concession stand at the Minnesota State Fair. Tommy Fabian, who stands 62"in cowboy boots and stetson hat, has a license to print money at Tiny Tot Donuts. Axel's former poker-playing buddy and expert mechanic Sam O'Gara also makes an appearance (He's Joe Crow's dad. Joe is Pete Hautman's reluctant detective in most of his books).
The set-up is this: Axel doesn't trust banks; he's got $260,000 stashed in coffee cans at the Motel 6 where he lives. Sam has hired his girlfriend Sophie Roman's daughter Carmen to work at his confession stand. She detests the place; she's also dating a skinhead named James Dean, who wants to relieve Axel of his money, but not before he tries to mug Tommy Fabian. If you've ever watched midget wrestling you have a pretty good idea of what a one-sided proposition that was. Tommy refers to James Dean as that "bald monkey".
The Minnesota State Fair is definitely the star vehicle here. Hautman has O'Gara pinch hit for Tommy at one point doing which time he says, "Gotta get myself a joint like this, sell deep-fried lutefisk on a stick or some goddamn thing." Sam also owns a pair of vicious dogs named Chester and Festus who're almost as funny as Sam.
Some critics compare Pete Hautman to Carl Hiaasen. I'll admit I've only read one of Hiaasen's books and I may be prejudiced because of all the Minnesota references, but I'd say Hautman is Charlie Chaplin to Hiaasen's Pinky Lee.

Rating:
Summary: A great ride.
Review: The Mortal Nuts is the best of the Hautman crime novels, but they are all great. He creates deep characters, wacky situations, spins it all together in the pressure cooker of everyday life, where there are real concerns at stake, real relationships hovering on the brink instead of this being another "wise guys and crooks" novel. I am really impressed with the story, the style, the laugh-out-loud humor, and the twists in the plot. Hautman is excellent, and I'm glad to see up and coming crime writers creating high quality novels like The Mortal Nuts.

Rating:
Summary: One of my favorite books
Review: This is the first book I read by this author, and it is great!
I have since read most of his other works and they are also very good. Rag Man, Ring Game, Drawing Dead, Short Money, Doohickey are all worth reading, but The Mortal Nuts, for me, is the best.
He has written some books more for children that I have not been interested in.
This is just a great read!