SOURCE: A review of St. Burl's Obituary, in The Atlantic Monthly, June, 1996, p. 126.

[In the following review, Adams complains that Akst's St. Burl's Obituary is "ultimately disappointing."]

Mr. Akst's novel starts with a provocative problem: how does a spectacularly obese man disappear? Burleigh Bennett, an obituary writer for a New York newspaper, lumbers out for a late dinner at the restaurant he has inherited and walks into a gangland execution. Unfortunately, he gets a good face-to-face look at the hit man. It becomes advisable to vanish. His adventures on the run are grotesque, elaborately gastronomic, and ultimately disappointing—at least for the reader. After all the ingeniously contrived to-do, one expects something more than a picnic in a graveyard.