Product Description

Barbaraannette Quinn loved her husband, Bobby, right up until the day he got in his truck,left their home in Cold Rock, Minnesota, and never returned. She has waited six years for him to walk back through her door, and now that she has hit the Powerball lottery, she's willing to give a million dollars to anyone who can make that happen.

Bobby and his girlfriend, Phlox, decide that she will turn him in, collect the million bucks, and then they'll both hightail it back to Arizona to live happily ever after. Unfortunately, everybody wants a piece of Bobby -- including a pair of hulking good ole boys, who figure Bobby owes them, and a sociopathic pretty boy freshout of St. Cloud Correctional, who notices that Barbaraannette's offer doesn't require that Bobby arrive alive. Toss in a shy marathon-running banker, a lovestruck humanities professor, and Barbaraannette's kleptomaniac mother, and things start getting a little hot in Cold Rock.

"I've really started something, haven't I?" Barbaraannette says. What she has started is a crackpot criminal conspiracy in Pete Hautman's funniest novel yet.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1336228 in Books
• Published on: 2000-03-01
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 288 pages

From Publishers Weekly
In a Minnesota peopled by Salem-smoking, cake-baking women and their disappointing, truant men, Hautman's faded rose Barbaraannette kills time and stakes her hopes on daily Powerball. The dumbest thing that Barbaraannette ever did was to marry her two-timing high school sweetheart Bobby Quinn?but the second dumbest is to offer up a hefty chunk of the $9-million lotto jackpot she's just won as a reward for his safe return. Missing for six years, having left only a broken-down Jeep and some abandoned fishing gear in his wake, Bobby Quinn has changed his name to Steele and is shacked up in Tucson with an untrustworthy ladyfriend named Phlox. When Barbaraannette's ship comes in, the couple see an opportunity for an easy swindle. They're not alone in this: friends of Bobby's whom he once gypped, professional crooks, extortionists and leeches of all kinds circle in on Barbaraannette's cash. And Barbaraannette 's protective sisters and senile mother will all butt in to protect her from herself. Hautman (Short Money) brings these eccentrics to life in a swift-paced, none-too-serious but colorful story with lots of entertainment potential.
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal
Ever wonder what a person would do for a million dollars? Barbarannette Quinn finds out in spades when she wins over $80 million in the Minnesota lottery and announces on Eyewitness News that she is offering a cool million for the safe return of her husband, Robert, who left six years earlier on a fishing trip from which he never returned. This announcement inspires as unrepentant a group of kooks as ever ran rampant through a Minnesota snow bank. Besides every Cadillac dealer in Minnesota (and two from Wisconsin), there's the young con artist who writes letters to celebrities soliciting money, the local college professor who gets a taste of murder and likes it, and Robert's current girlfriend, who says she'd give up oxygen for a million dollars. Barbarannette's travails make a riotous story of good luck, bad timing, and redemption in the best tradition of Donald Westlake. Hautman is also the author of Ring Game (LJ 10/1/97) and Mortal Nuts (LJ 5/1/96). Highly recommended.AThomas L. Kilpatrick, Southern Illinois Univ. Lib., Carbondale
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Kirkus Reviews
Hautman goes head-to-head against Carl Hiassen's Lucky You with his own hilarious take on the larcenous lemmings that swarm around a lottery winner. Why shouldn't sweet, tough, innocent Barbaraannette Quinn, the second-grade teacher who for years has been playing permutations of her relatives' birthdays in Powerball, rake in an $8.9 million windfall? And why shouldn't she impulsively decide, confronted by TV cameras outside the lottery office, to offer a million-dollar reward for the return of her husband Bobby? After all, Bobby's not exactly estranged, hes just been AWOL for six years. And now, living as boot salesman Bobby Steele with voluptuous, good-natured Phlox Anderson in Tucson, he gets wind of his wife's offer within seconds and decides to turn himself in for the reward, figuring he'll put off worrying about what he's going to do about the women in his life till after he's got the greenbacks in his hand. But more pressing complications ensue. Reaching his hometown of Cold Rock, Minnesota, Bobby's immediately spotted by ethereally beautiful, deeply sociopathic con man Jayjay Morrow, who's happy to interrupt his routine of writing lying, cadging letters to celebrities and sponging off his latest admirer, the besotted Professor Andr Gideon, to kidnap Bobby and hold him for ransom. Feisty Barbaraannette, the daughter of Hautman semi-regular Sam O'Gara (The Mortal Nuts, 1996, etc.), doesn't take this development lying down. And neither does Phlox, or Barbaraannette-smitten bank officer Art Dobbleman, or those Henry High ex-football players Hugh Hulke and Rodney Gent. You can try to imagine what sorts of things happen next, though you'll be two steps behind Hautman. If Hautman's line-by-line writing is less joyously baroque than Hiassen'sand it's an awfully close racehis powers of invention and dexterity are even greater as he provides delightfully unexpected roles for Jayjay, Phlox, Gideon, and Barbaraannette's senile mother Hilde Grabo. -- Copyright ©1999, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Customer Reviews

The professor has a mean streak
Sam O'Gara appears in most of Hautman's novels. In this one he gets a bare mention. He's the father of Barbaraannette Quinn, who wins the lottery and decides to spend a million of it trying to win her husband Bobby back. He absconded six years before and she's never gotten over the good-looking devil.
Bobby, along with his girlfriend, Phlox, sees her offer on TV. They decide to claim the reward and then split, which strains credulity because people are looking for Bobby in Cold Rock, Minnesota. You see, before he left, he conned these two guys out of money to start a dude ranch, and he runs into them as soon as he sets foot in Cold Rock. Suddenly everybody wants the million dollars and Bobby changes hands more often than the Hope diamond.
There are a lot of quirky characters in MRS. MILLION, but probably the most interesting one is the college professor, Andre Gideon, who just happens to be in the right place (or wrong, depending upon how you look at it). He's more interested in JJ Morrow, another con man, who sends letters to celebrities to mooch money off of them. Gideon is unique because Hautman is working against type. Gideon looks about as violent as Shirley Temple, but he's got a mean streak as long as the English Chunnel.
There's a lot of internal monologue in this novel, which slows down the pace, but it speeds up when Barbaraanette collects the million in cash from her marathon-running banker, who just happens to have loved her forever. The funniest part is how often the money changes hands. You'll start counting heads when the money disappears. Everybody seems to be accounted for.
The eventual resolution is sidesplitting.

Decent, But He's Done Better
As in his previous books, Drawing Dead and the excellent The Mortal Nuts, Hautman brings Carl Hiassan's tradition of wild and wacky characters to small-town Minnesota. When a 30ish single woman wins the Powerball lottery, she offers $1,000,000 for the return of her missing no-good husband, who disappeared six years ago. This is catalyst for shady shenanigans as he and his girlfriend head back to collect the money. Of course there are other people seeking to claim the reward themselves, etc... Everything ends true to formula, and it doesn't have quite the sharp bite that his other books do.

Quirky, lighthearted, and very entertaining
If you've read your way through Carl Hiaissen, Elmore Leonard, and James W. Hall but haven't discovered Pete Hautman, "Mrs. Million" is a great place to start. Reviewers who were expecting big action or complex plotting in this book were probably disappointed, but only because they missed the point. Hautman's work is very easy to escape into because it IS odd-ball. It doesn't have to make sense!

The characters in this book, like in those in "Short Money," are very offbeat, but immensely likeable. Except for the villains, of course, who are equally offbeat but easy to despise. But like Hiaissen's villains, they always get what's coming to them.

I've only read two of Hautman's books, but I'm using an Amazon gift certificate to stock up (and then fortify my local library). Keep up the good work, Mr. Hautman.