The Way of All Fish: A Novel

This starts out much better than it finishes. Had high hopes for it based on first couple of chapters, but after a while it was just silly. I'd read her earlier book about the publishing industry, and thought some characters were her old "Jury" people plopped into New York and the publishing world. This book is better, but may disappoint those who really like Martha Grimes and really want to like everything she writes. The major focus of the book is a campaign to frighten a disagreeable literary agent. It's never clear why someone who's supposed to be as tough and nasty as the agent is so terribly affected by the tricks other characters play on him. A number of characters join in the plot, but it's also never really clear why, probably because the characters are very lightly sketched in. The woman in whose name the plot against the agent is undertaken nearly disappears from the story until the end. Ms. Grimes could probably have had a book that was more than okay if she'd put more time into it than she seems to have devoted to this one. Maybe she was fulfilling a contract and was writing on a tight deadline, or maybe she's just getting tired of writing. Either way, I really wish I'd waited for the paperback, or more reviews.

Watch your back Hiaasen! Why? Well, Martha Grimes has taken a brief trip to Florida and in has caressed the Everglades in her wonderful style of humor. If you're reading this and think, oh it's a Florida book, you'd be wrong, and it was cruel of me to mislead you. This wonderful book is about the zany justice two contract killers enact against an inscrutable agent. I can't without spoiling it tell you why they do it. Or how they drag characters from her previous work "Foul Matter" into it. But I am going to say this was so much fun to read that I had to have the book taken out of my hands (between chapter 47 and 48) because my laughter was keeping everybody awake. Who sleeps at 2AM?This is a sequel, but since it had been a while since I read "Foul Matter" it took me awhile until the plot of that book seeped into my consciousness. It wasn't forgettable, I just read a lot and fast.Martha writes the "Richard Jury Series," which I loved enough to crawl in between and under the West Palm Beach Library stacks to find the book that was missing but was supposed to be there.She is a lady and a humorist. She is a writer and a story teller. And she has my esteem.

This is a very good satire of the publishing industry and genre authors. To enjoy the book, one caution is that you cannot be queasy about high school corridor language—the truly foul vocabulary of teenaged kids at school when grandma can’t hear them. Please note that the strong language is completely consistent with the characters using it. As always with Martha Grimes’s work, not one (foul or other) word is misplaced. The Marx brothers could have easily worked this material into a “Night at the Opera II”.

I absolutely love Martha Grimes and have read everything she's written (except her autobiography). Her Richard Jury, Dakota, and Hotel Paradise series are fantastic as are various spinoffs she's done with some of the characters. However, I feel Martha Grimes is trying too hard to be funny and clever with these characters. Almost like she's trying to channel Janet Evanovich (another author I love) but just not carrying it off as well as a writer of her breadth & experience could have done. The characters are interesting and so is the plot but it's hard to keep up with what's going on sometimes. Her Richard Jury novels had wonderfully playful bits in them so I know she can do humor very well. I just don't think this series is on par with all of her other works. Still, I will continue to read them because I'm a dedicated fan of this author.

I laughed until I cried. The play of words, characters, plots, subplots and fish provided me with ingenuous delight. The subtleties of the humor of this book require more than one reading.

I was introduced to Karl and Candy in a previous story. This story line is a little more predictable than the first book. As always Martha Grimes is fun to read and one genuinely likes the two hit men. I was a little less taken with Cindy and her stuckness in her book writing. Otherwise a great read

After reading Foul Matter by Martha Grimes, I could hardly wait to read the sequel, The Way of All Fish. I am reading it as slowly as possible because I don't want it to end. The two hit men are hysterical in their outsiders view of what they see as a business much more cut throat than theirs, the publishing industry. Don't want to give anything away except I find myself laughing out loud which I rarely do. HIghly recommend.

Humorous take-off on the publishing industry. Contains lots of unusual characters. Not quite as good as predecessor, Foul Matter, but that may be because the situations and characters were new to me in the first book..

it was not at all like the Jury books which I like very much. I had trouble finishing it and wished after that I hadn't bothered.

Funky, witty, I enjoyed it.

Enjoyable book