Top Kiernan has been doing all right. He owns Polymath, a thriving research firm that he runs from his home, a 1930s-era schoolhouse just outside of Athens, Georgia. He's got a bedroom in a basketball court, a drawerful of flannel shirts, and a splendid collection of spinning tops. He's got friends; he's got Gillie. And a side-gig with Shaw's Mercantile, which sends him on periodic and variably perilous errands to Latin America, helps him satisfy his adrenaline habit. Edgy, brilliant, intense, Top's got life buzzing as close to perfect as he can imagine.Only now Top's long-best friend, Dee Lane, has disappeared with a fortune that belongs to Atlanta drug lord Raoul Menes. And in Buzz Monkey's shifty world of hazardous secrets and hostile camps, Top finds himself the target not merely of Menes but also of ambitious DEA agents, a retired IRA assassin, a gang of meth-cooking rednecks, an urbane CIA recruiter, and two goons in wraparound sunglasses and double-breasted sharkskin suits. Because everyone thinks Dee left the money with Top.With fingerless corpses showing up in the Oconee River and buddies disappearing into north Georgia's dark green woods, Top knows he is working against time to meet Mene's very literal deadline for producing the missing $1.5 million in cash. Read Less