Inventor's Assistant or Best Friend Eleven year old Barney Gile turns into an alligator creature when he's upset. The hardest part of this is keeping it secret. Luckily, the inventor he lives with, Mr. Thomas, can help him. Barney also has another issue. He wants to get closer to Mr. Thomas, but the inventor calls being close to anyone dangerous. Barney never knew why this was until a gun-and-science loving couple starts hunting them down. Together, Barney and Mr. Thomas go on all sorts of adventures, each one a separate story. Sometimes they're battling the crazy couple and other times they're going to strange places like inside a video game or the Mirror World. They're also meeting people like a clone who thinks he's a goat or a brave girl who might have a crush on Barney. As they go on more and more adventures, Barney realizes Mr. Thomas is the closest thing he's ever had to a friend. Maybe he's even the father Barney never had, but does Mr. Thomas feel the same way?

Join Detective Barney in these thrilling tales set in the 1910s by Harvey Jerrold O'Higgins. Mystery, culture, and adventure intertwine in these stories. O'Higgins crafts each tale with suspense and intrigue, ensuring readers are hooked from start to finish. Barney's detective skills and sharp wit make for an unforgettable protagonist. A detective's captivating journey.

Charged with comic energy and a steely disregard for any pieties whatsoever, Barney's Version is a major Richler novel, the most personal and feeling book of a long and distinguished career. Told in the first person, it gives us the life (and what a life!) of Barney Panofsky--whose trashy TV company, Totally Useless Productions, has made him a small fortune; whose three wives include a martyred feminist icon, a quintessential JCP (Jewish-Canadian Princess), and the incomparable Miriam, the perfect wife, lover, and mother--alas, now married to another man; who recalls with nostalgia and pain his young manhood in the Paris of the early fifties, and his lifelong passion for wine, women, and the Montreal Canadiens; who either did or didn't murder his best friend, Boogie, after discovering him in bed with The Second Mrs. Panofsky; whose satirical eye for the idiocies of today's Quebec separatists (as well as for every other kind of political correctness) manages to offend his entire acquaintanceship (and will soon be offending readers everywhere); and whose memory--though not his bile--is, in his sixty-seventh year, definitely slipping . . .