From the international best-selling author of Politically Correct Bedtime Stories comes a new mystery genre: Clown noir! In Top Town, a ghetto full of washed-up circus lifers in the shadow of a big city, audiences come every night for cheap thrills, both wholesome and not. Fire eaters perform for gin money. Gypsies reveal the future (and for 20 bucks can make it happen). Daredevils cheat Death time after time, but once. And witness to it all is one of the most loved and notorious figures in Top Town, a tough joey with a deadly past and a nose for picking all the wrong fights: Rex Koko, private clown. The Wet Nose of Danger yanks our hero out of his element when he is hired by a high society dame to get to the bottom of a dognapping epidemic among the show dogs at the kennel club. At the same time, he is asked to hunt down two missing sideshow freaks. Where do his loyalties lie -- with the blue-bloods who will never accept him, or with the kinkers who will never forgive him for a past tragedy? Add to the mix transvestite mobsters, rogue elephant seals, midget policemen, randy joey-jumpers, fugitive Nazis, and a dangerous face-off on the docks of Marseilles, and you have a gripping, hilarious thriller that won't stop humping your leg. Pistols! Palookas! Pampered pooches! As e.e. cummings said, "Damn everything, but the circus!"