From Publishers Weekly
Blend a madcap plot involving the legendary Fountain of Youth with a zany cast of barflies, garnish with a thin SF twist, and you've got the ingredients for the latest frothy concoction in Hugo-winner Robinson's (Callahan's Key) multivolume tall tale. Laid-back barkeep Jake Stonebender has been serving customers in The Place, a Key West saloon whose oddball patrons routinely tickle the space-time continuum and occasionally save the universe, for 10 years when he's touched for protection money by Little Tony Donuts, a humvee-sized mafioso who hopes to ingratiate himself with the Five Old Men who own everything in the world. Jake's scientifically precocious daughter, Erin, comes to the rescue with a scheme to sell Tony the fabled Fountain and "prove" its existence with increasingly youthful incarnations of herself conjured through time travel. Mishaps involving Erin's uptight truant officer, misuse of a timehopping gizmo, and-in the tale's soberest moment-terminal illness for one of the regulars, steer the story down fantastically unpredictable avenues. There's more mixer than hard stuff in this fruity farce, but the fare that keeps Robinson's fans coming back for another round-atrocious puns and song parodies, snickering SF in-jokes and the outrageous eccentricities of the series characters-is available in abundance. New and repeat visitors to Callahan's turf will find this a harmless diversion from more serious concerns.Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist
OK, it's really Erin Stonebender-Berkowitz and Willard the Professor's con. Callahan zapped out of his namesake series long ago and isn't answering his emergency phone. So when Zoey, Erin's mom, gets caught in hard vacuum, Jake, Erin's dad, convenes a neural bank to boost Erin's computer's capacity to calculate where in hard vacuum Zoey is. But that's getting ahead of the story, which begins when a board-of-ed inspector comes to assess whether 13-year-old Erin is receiving adequate home schooling. Now Erin was born smarter than the whole Callahan gang put together. She can teleport and time-travel--otherwise, why would she be the one to rescue Zoey? Anyway, the inspector's threat pales when a mastodon-size would-be Mafioso hits town (Key West) and starts shaking down the gang's watering hole, which Jake runs. Hence the con: gotta get ridda the gorilla. The wordplay flies fast and funny as always in a Callahan's romp, and the characters, regular and new, are pretty darn amusing. If only the long ending weren't so soppy. Ray Olson
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

FROM THE PUBLISHER

The discreet little bar that Jake Stonebender established a few blocks below Duval Street was named simply The Place. There, Fast Eddie Costigan learned to curse back at parrots as he played the house piano; the Reverend Tom Hauptman learned to tend bar barechested (without blushing), Long-Drink McGonnigle discovered the margarita and several senoritas, and all the other regulars settled into comfortable subtropical niches of their own. Nobody even noticed them save the universe.

Over time, the twice-transplanted patrons of Callahan's Place attracted a collection of local zanies so quintessentially Key West pixilated that they made the New York originals seem, well, almost normal. The elfin little Key deer, for instance - with a stevedore's mouth; or the merman with eczema; or Robert Heinlein's teleporting cat.

For ten slow, merry years, life was good. The sun shone, the coffee dripped, the breeze blew just strongly enough to dissipate the smell of the puns, and little supergenius Erin grew to the verge of adolescence. Then disaster struck.

Through the gate one sunny day came a malevolent, moronic mastodon of a Mafioso named Tony Donuts Jr., or Little Nuts (don't ask). He'd decided to resurrect the classic protection racket in Key West - and guess which tavern he picked to hit first? Then, thanks to very poor accessorizing (she chose the wrong belt - and no, we're not going to explain that one), Jake's wife, Zoey, suddenly found herself in a place with no light, no heat, and no air. And no way home. The urgent question was where - precisely where - but that turned out to be a problem so complex that even the entire gang, equipped with teleportation, time travel, and telepathicsyntony (you can look it up), might not be able to crack it in time.

And while all this was going on, Death himself walked into The Place. But, this time he would not leave alone.

FROM THE CRITICS

Publishers Weekly

Blend a madcap plot involving the legendary Fountain of Youth with a zany cast of barflies, garnish with a thin SF twist, and you've got the ingredients for the latest frothy concoction in Hugo-winner Robinson's (Callahan's Key) multivolume tall tale. Laid-back barkeep Jake Stonebender has been serving customers in The Place, a Key West saloon whose oddball patrons routinely tickle the space-time continuum and occasionally save the universe, for 10 years when he's touched for protection money by Little Tony Donuts, a humvee-sized mafioso who hopes to ingratiate himself with the Five Old Men who own everything in the world. Jake's scientifically precocious daughter, Erin, comes to the rescue with a scheme to sell Tony the fabled Fountain and "prove" its existence with increasingly youthful incarnations of herself conjured through time travel. Mishaps involving Erin's uptight truant officer, misuse of a timehopping gizmo, and-in the tale's soberest moment-terminal illness for one of the regulars, steer the story down fantastically unpredictable avenues. There's more mixer than hard stuff in this fruity farce, but the fare that keeps Robinson's fans coming back for another round-atrocious puns and song parodies, snickering SF in-jokes and the outrageous eccentricities of the series characters-is available in abundance. New and repeat visitors to Callahan's turf will find this a harmless diversion from more serious concerns. Agent, Eleanor Wood. (Aug. 8) Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.

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