Mrs. Million [Paperback]

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.Pete Hautman is the author of National Book Award–winning novelGodless,Sweetblood,Hole in the Sky,Stone Cold,The Flinkwater Factor,The Forgetting Machine, andMr. Was, which was nominated for an Edgar Award by the Mystery Writers of America, as well as several adult novels. He lives in Minnesota and Wisconsin. Visit him at PeteHautman.com.

 Chapter One

When Barbaraannette Quinn heard the Powerball numbers come over the radio she was busy decorating a Cowboy Cake for her niece, spelling out Brittany in pink script beneath a peanut-butter-frosting rendering of a cowboy hat.

She was giving this cake her all because she could still remember her own seventh birthday party. Her mother had served Hostess chocolate cupcakes with the little corkscrew of icing on top. No candles. Her birthday presentlÃ'