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"Murray Whelan should have been asleep in bed. That's where the smart money was at 4:30 a.m. on a cold, wet, southern Australia winter morning. Not loitering among the truck drivers in Melbourne's fruit and vegetable market. Not picking a fight with a gun-toting kid in a cashmere coat. Not tasting forbidden fruit in the back of Donny Maitland's rig. Not turning his back on a body that bore a striking resemblance to a sack of tomatoes en route to becoming spaghetti sauce." "But what's a lonely political advisor to do? His son Red, on temporary loan to his ex-wife, has disappeared, and his boss, Angelo Agnelli, has sent him on a mission to infiltrate the toughest union in the country. And that was before Angelo asked him the really big ask - the favor that you'd have to be a fool, or maybe Murray Whelan, to agree to."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved… (more)
User reviews
7 out of 10
Finally read the first of this trilogy, The Big Ask. I really enjoyed it although it's not what I expected from the cover. Very funny in parts and quite scathing of politicians and unions.
Murray Whelan
But Murray has a bigger worry because his son, who lives with Murray's ex-wife in Sydney, has disappeared from his private boarding school. Murray is just about to fly to Sydney when his son, Red, turns up at his house in Melbourne and says he doesn't want to go back to his mother. Murray is thrilled to have Red living with him but when he is visited by thugs who threaten him unless he tells the police Donny killed Darren, Murray gets concerned about whether he can keep Red safe.
It all works out in the end. In fact, Murray ends up being elected to represent Melbourne North in parliament when Agnelli is exposed in flagrante with a woman not his wife. Labor has lost its majority though so Murray is a Member of Her Majesty's Loyal Opposition.
You know how most works of fiction have a paragraph at the front of the book that says events and people in the book are imaginary and not meant to represent real occurrences or people. This is what Shane Maloney put in the front of this book:
The author of this book, its setting and its characters are entirely fictitious. There is no such place as Melbourne. The Australian Labor Party exists only in the imagination of its members.
I loved his sense of humour.
Lots of amusing lines and situations here and Whelan