Layer cake (n): a metaphor for the murky layers of the criminal world. Smooth-talking drug dealer X has a plan to quietly bankroll enough cash to retire before his thirtieth birthday. Operating under the polished veneer of a legitimate businessman, his mantra is to keep a low profile and run a tight operation until it's time to get out. When kingpin Jimmy Price asks him to find the wayward daughter of a wealthy socialite who's been running around with a cokehead, he accepts the job with the promise that after this he can leave the criminal world behind with Jimmy's blessing. Oh, and he needs to find a buyer for two million ecstasy pills acquired by a crew of lowly, loud-mouth gangsters, the Yahoos. Simple enough, until an assassin named Klaus arrives to scratch him off his list, revealing this job is much more than it seems at first. From the glitz of the London club scene of the 1990's to the underbelly of its criminal world, Layer Cake is the best in British crime fiction.

Hiding out in the Carribean until the heat dies down from his last job, X is thinking it's time to ditch the resort life and calls up his old friend Morty to plot his return to London. But he's hardly stepped off the plane when his associates, Sonny King and Roy 'Twitchy' Burns, get on the wrong side of a feuding Venezuelan drug cartel on the hunt for a sensitive package. Suddenly he's thrown into a stand-off between rival mobs and with so many players in the game it's tough going making out who wants to cut him a deal and who's trying to kill him. Darkly comic, fast-paced and full of twists Viva la Madness is packed with sex, scams, drugs and enough dirty money to fill a few offshore bank accounts.

The "Get Carter" of the 2000s, "Layer Cake" was made into a highly praised film starring Daniel Craig and Sienna Miller. Now Connolly is back with a sequel filled with his trademark dark humor, razor-sharp dialogue, and quick-fi re violence. In "Viva la Madness" the anonymous hero of Layer Cake is stranded in the Caribbean, itching for the gangster life he left behind--but he's still a wanted man back home. Soon he joins forces with two robust London criminals: the menacing Sonny King and his paranoid partner Roy "Twitchy" Burns. From the beach to an urban underworld, "Viva la Madness" moves to trans-Atlantic drug deals and high-tech electronic fraud, portrayed with the same uncanny believability. A dazzling combination of London low-life and Caribbean high-life, readers will find this antihero's voice authentic and whiplash inducing in equal shares.