The new novel from Brad Smith is the kind of fast-paced, plot-rich book that begs to be called, in all earnestness, a rollicking good time. In fact, it captures the excitement of its characters’ lives so well that it might inspire a reader to run out and make baleful country music or buy a dilapidated truck and drive to rural America.

Smith’s characters are eccentric, but not stereotypically so. Everett, the old man of the Eastman family, dies in the opening chapters, leaving his estate split up into pieces that his three children – all from different mothers – will inherit, but only after completing a twisted run of hurdles. Kick, Everett’s middle child and the novel’s protagonist, is a documentary filmmaker who drinks her rye cut with water and has no trouble identifying what she wants – be it a young cowboy musician in Nashville or the scoop on a rancher uprising in Wyoming – and doing what she needs to do to get it. Ethan, the youngest Eastman kid, is a depressive stoner who speaks almost exclusively in Bob Dylan lyrics while making quiet progress on a project of his own. Ben, the oldest Eastman and the novel’s would-be villain, is not as eccentric as he is typical: a bloated middle-aged man who spends more time on the links and with his mistress than he does at the office.

Branching off from the three Eastman children is a supporting cast of offbeat characters, including a tiny but scrappy Nashville music producer, a quiet, quick-thinking young businesswoman, a fake-breasted blonde-cum-fitness enthusiast, and a now-bankrupt country music legend.

Smith weaves together an absurd number of plotlines, each with its own unexpected twists and turns, so deftly that the novel’s dénouement comes as a believable resolution that is not the slightest bit trite. Of course, it does help that the straight-shooting Kick is as vocally skeptical of a pat ending as any reader would be.