The Asterisk Club is comprised of murderers who have been acquitted of their crimes in court. They now live in luxury, gloating over their past misdeeds, and smugly basking in the fact that they managed to get away with their crimes. Their leader is a man who savagely attacked and hurled four women to their deaths from fast-moving trains…and he is still amused by the memories.

The Asterisk Club resides in a home next door to two couples who are each odious in their own way. Members of the Asterisk Club begin dropping dead in their neighbors’ home, and the neighboring couples try very hard to hush the deaths up and keep the dead bodies under wraps, but they are not terribly successful.

The Asterisk Club has a resident tomcat that gets threatened with death and has crystal glassware thrown at him. The neighbors have a resident dog that gets kicked and threatened with demise as well. And rats are smashed to death with tennis rackets and one poor creature is even glued alive to a piece of board…and then killed.

So, a lot of the characters are brutal murderers who got off scot-free, all of the characters are positively despicable, and all of the action occurs against a backdrop of rampant animal cruelty. And the author just assumes that readers are going to find all of this uproariously hilarious.

I found myself wishing everyone in the book would get brutally murdered, and I didn’t care a fig who the culprit was; I gave up reading about a third of the way through this tasteless piece of whatnot. ( )

I don't know if the book really deserves 4 stars, but one of them is for the very start which is a hilarious attempt to get rid of a body. It's a gem. ( )

I was laughing uproariously. What a caper! Pamela Branch is a genius. Thank you Rue Morgue Press for bringing her back into print. ( )

The Asterisk Club is a home for murderers who were acquitted. Newly released Benji Cann finds himself living with the artistic couples next door when there is not room for him at the club. When bodies (including Cann's) begin to turn up, both homes find themselves trying to hide the corpses. The emphasis is on comedy rather than mystery. Unfortunately, I don't think I was in the mood for this sort of book at the time I read it, and it didn't work all that well for me. I did recognize that it would be loved by persons who enjoy farces as well as many mystery lovers. ( )

In most mysteries, when an amateur is confronted with a dead body, he or she spends the rest of the novel looking for clues to identify the culprit. Not in this mystery! Miscommunication, suspicion, and false assumptions lead to absurdity as two couples who share a house try to hide the bodies of the strangers who are making a habit of dying on their premises. The corpses have something in common. They were members of the Asterisk Club next door, with a membership roll filled with wrongly-acquitted murderers. The story is as much farce as it is mystery, and it's full of black humor. It's the sort of book you don't want to put down once the action starts. It's the perfect book for an afternoon or evening escape. ( )