When the classical scholar Phineas Ort, Bogus U.'s first choice for president, disappears, the search committee decides to recruit a hit man to keep the fractious faculty in line. Phineas has been abducted by the Robaccia gang, who aim to install their own candidate in the president's office to cash in on Bogus U.'s well-known corruption. Christy Mahon, a former member of the Robaccia gang, now on the lam for having crossed its boss, Brooklyn Benny, has landed a job at Bogus U. as a janitor. Listening through a heating vent, he overhears the search committee's deliberations and decides to interview for the job, which he ultimately lands in a funny and subversive chain of events. Laura Favoloso, who has her own ties to the mob, works at Bogus U. and provides Christy with an insider's view of its inner workings and lower depths. Under Laura's influence and tutelage, Christy reluctantly begins to transform into a new man, and tries to institute rigorous academic standards, raising the ire and exciting the violent tendencies of the student population. But the student body is not the only quarter from which Christy must guard himself from mortal harm-a hit has been ordered on Christy, and he must use his old street smarts as well as his newly acquired political savvy to survive and protect his legacy.

New York City in 1922 saw showpeople like Fanny Brice and Harry Houdini rubbing shoulders with confidence men and bootleggers like Arnold Rothstein, the gambler reputed to have fixed the 1919 World Series. Henrietta Fine, a precocious sixteen-year-old apprentice locksmith, weaves in and out of this world, living by her wits and the double-cross. Her safe cracking skills make her useful to both Houdini and to the wily Rothstein, who provides cover for her after the police implicate her in a diamond heist. Her picaresque adventures take her from the woods of New Jersey, whose secret Indian trails afford escape from red-baiting anti-semtic mobs, to the coves of Long Island, where she becomes a companion of a doomed bootlegger. Drawn with exquisite detail and told in a voice Henrietta's that recalls the stylish gossip (or "Chin Music") of the Flapper, Paul Levitt's debut novel will entertain readers with its uncanny evocation of an era when the gangster held a place of celebrity and a teen-age girl could be his unwitting or outwitting collaborator.

" "The Weighty Word Book"] will appeal to kids who want to sound as smart as they are. It offers a clever, funny way to introduce new words into the vocabulary. . . . There's one word for every letter of the alphabet--wait until you see what they do with dogmatic, juxtapose and zealot."--"The Gazette" (Colorado Springs, Colorado)
"Each of these twenty-six short stories takes an elaborate, circuitous path that leads to a 'weighty' one-word punch line. . . . It's a creative and humorous approach to vocabulary building, and a natural lead in to having students create their own tall tales with multisyllabic conclusions."--"School Library Journal"
Ages 9 and up.