Amaze Your Friends
By Peter Doyle
1998
First Published
4.19
Average Rating
261
Number of Pages
Part of Series
SYDNEY, 1959. Billy Glasheen is flogging mailorder schemes out of a seedy back room in Chinatown. Want to play guitar in 14 days? Learn Italian in your spare time? Win big with an infallible betting system? Master the love secrets of the ancients? Bill’s your man. But there are unsettled accounts in Billy’s past, and they’re coming due. As shadowy factions line up around him, he can’t be sure if he’s the target or caught in someone else’s crossfire. Or is he imagining the whole thing? Finally an ultimatum is come up with a small fortune in hush money, or cop a bullet and a shallow grave. Six months, and the clock is ticking. It’s time to call in all debts and favours, but right when he needs them most, Bill’s old gang of beatniks, bandits, and hoochie coochie girls seem to have made themselves strangely scarce. He’s on his own. Amaze Your Friends is a dark, wild ride through a city of easy money and sudden falls, of high times and hangovers, of jukebox rock’n’roll and the lowdown flophouse blues.
Avg Rating
4.19
Number of Ratings
32
5 STARS
44%
4 STARS
44%
3 STARS
3%
2 STARS
6%
1 STARS
3%
goodreads
Author
Peter Doyle
Author · 9 books
Peter Doyle was born in Maroubra, in Sydney’s eastern suburbs. He worked as a taxi driver, musician, and teacher before writing his first book, "Get Rich Quick", which won the Ned Kelly Award for Best First Crime Novel. He has published two further books featuring protagonist Billy Glasheen, "Amaze Your Friends" and "The Devil’s Jump", and a fourth, "The Big Whatever", is slated for publication in October 2014. He is also the author of the acclaimed "City of Shadows: Sydney Police Photographs 1912–1948" and "Crooks Like Us". In 2010 Doyle received the Ned Kelly Lifetime Achievement Award.
