The Buck Passes Flynn

The book opens with Flynn assassinating the President of the United States.  It's a mock assassination, only meant to prove that Flynn's agency - N. N. - is quite capable and worthy of contract work for the government.  Shortly afterward, Flynn is assigned to find out why envelopes filled with $100,000 are flooding random locations and causing havoc.  He starts in the abandoned town of Ada, where every resident received an envelope and left.  Population 1800 to 3 in less than a week.  He found many of the former residents in Las Vegas, most worse off than before.  In a resort island town in Massachusetts, the reverse happened.  The residents stayed but kicked out the tourists.  Not a single business is still open but there are frequent delivery boats to cater to the hermit-like residents.  Who is dumping all this money and why?

Flynn has become a less interesting character here.  Rather than an odd police inspector, he is now an international spy.  Sure, there were hints of that in the last book, but here we see his spycraft.  Meh.  His infiltration of Russia is played for laughs.  He has adopted more of Fletch's non-sequitur comments that play more to the reader than to whomever he is addressing.  His super agency that seems to know all on short notice totally fails to make any effort to identify a tag along character claiming to be sent by the president.  Really?  And now we discover that N.N. is opposed by the nasty and villainous K agency, which has a campus in Russia.  Good grief, this is sounding like KAOS vs. CONTROL from Get Smart!

The plot has holes the size of Texas.  Suddenly a bunch of non-counterfeit bills are appearing and, it is finally revealed, that they were bills that should have been incinerated over the last many years.  Um, you know bills have serial numbers.  That first batch with real money should have revealed that someone wasn't incinerating money.

Though it begins well enough and certainly piques one's interest, it devolves into a screed on inflation, the petrodollar, and the monetary system.  The constant harping on inflation grew more and more tedious.  Of course, when the book was written (1980), inflation was double digits.  The impact of the $100K envelopes is one long tale of woe and disaster, to which Flynn responds with smart ass commentary.  The mix of 'comedy' with his clear concern regarding the eroding value of money didn't work.

Though warned that Flynn was just hiding out as a Boston Inspector and his real job was being a 'spy' for some No Name (N. N.) agency, it would have been better to just leave him as the quirky detective.  Beyond the opening assassination, he never uses a gun, he never gets in a brawl, doesn't break-in or infiltrate anywhere.  Heck, all the doors and gates are literally open or unlocked.  Even the Russian police officer proves to be nothing but helpful to an obvious foreigner without any documents.  Sigh.

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