Books: Good Behavior By Donald E. Westlake (1985)

"John Dortmunder's one of the slyest burglars going. While fleeing the police during his latest caper, he falls through the roof of the Silent Sisterhood of St. Filumena -and tumbles into the lap of trouble. It's an act of God, the sisters exclaim. Only the Creator himself could have sent this criminal just when they needed him. Sure, they'll shelter him from the cops. But there's a price: He must help them to retrieve their youngest and newest member from her father's clutches. This promises to get sticky. Dear old dad hates the Sisterhood like the plague. And he happens to have an odd hobby: putting together mercenary armies."

Good Behavior, the sixth book in the John Dortmunder series, is another tale of pure delight. And much like the last book, Why Me, Donald E. Westlake continues to shift away from Andy Kelp being the jinx of the team and just make John have some sort of "curse" of bad luck. This sort of alters both the character and the nature of John's burglary career, and it's a weird transition from the first three or four books in the series, but it's noticeable. But not horrible in any way, though.

Like the rest of the Dortmunder tales, the book is filled with various hijinks, with some fun and some outright funny set pieces (Dortmunder's inadvertent recruitment into this army is the best of a lot of funny scenes), with great dialogue, along with poking fun at some lowlife characters that exist in New York of that bygone era (including the cops). One of the best things about this series is how different all the plots are -Westlake creates some pretty unique and clever things for Dortmunder to get out of. I've read as the series ages, the plots remain fairly tight, but seem to go on longer than the should. Even Good Behavior seemed to go on longer that it should, but that may just be my warped opinion.