Nina Dolgoy leads her neighbours on a campaign to renovate the community pool, but the only way she can think to raise money is to rob a bank. Unfortunately, she isn’t very good at it.

In a part of town so beaten down that even prostitutes and drug dealers have written if off, Nina Dolgoy imagines that if the local pool wasn’t boarded up, her little daughters could use it to burn off their wayward energy and avoid falling into utter degradation. So the bitterly self-proclaimed "welfare queen" leads her neighbours on a fundraising, pool-fixing community-improvement campaign that proves the sad old adage that no good deed ever goes unpunished.

The only way Nina can think to raise money herself is by robbing a bank. Unfortunately, she isn’t very good at it. Coincidentally, her brother, Frank, gets out of jail and robs one.

The explosive events that are unleashed force Nina and the girls to flee for their lives, but their escape turns into a sublimely bizarre chase during which Nina somehow needs to pull the wool over everybody’s eyes.

Joey Slinger, formerly a Toronto Star columnist, has published two collections of columns, No Axe Too Small to Grind, which won the Leacock Medal for Humour, and If It's a Jungle Out There, Why Do I Have to Mow the Lawn? He makes almost no excuses for living in Toronto where he divides his time between the dark craft of comic novels, Punch Line being his first, and searching for his car keys.

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• Commended, Dewey Divas and the Dudes

a fun ride that does what farce is meant to do: enjoyably fill the time.

The Toronto Star

"Slinger, a former Toronto Star columnist, mines the absurdities of life for humour, and has a number of nice turns of phrase and observations on the human condition"

Publishers Weekly

"Funny, engaging and and original. I enjoyed it thoroughly."

Joy Fielding

This comic novel is just the right antidote to our all-too-Canadian complacency about how very nice we all are our national identity could use a dose of these dark little comedic broadcasts from the mind of Joey Slinger.

The Winnipeg Review

Satirical, corny, raucous and as full of slapstick as a Ben Stiller movie

The Winnipeg Free Press