Dock Bass is a straight-talking man’s man from upstate New York who likes carpentry and cold beer, but does not suffer fools. He gets himself fired from his job as a realtor. He abandons his shallow wife. He gets an unexpected letter from a law firm in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. So he packs up his red pickup to find out what’s what in Gettysburg. There, he inherits a decrepit farmhouse and 25-acre property from long-lost relatives.

While renovating he finds an untouched cache of Civil War relics including, perhaps, the only known (and nearly priceless) sound recording of Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address. Quite a few things ensue: hilarity, calamity, lots of sardonic quips, even an assault involving lumber. In short, the quiet, back-to-basics country life Dock had envisioned unravels, with a company of befuddled academics, brutish crooks, and shrewd journalists all out for a piece of his newfound fortune.

Dunnville, Ontario-based author Brad Smith’s Busted Flush starts out fast and keeps pace, lagging only once or twice in the poky subplot, and ends strong. Smith has a knack for punchy dialogue. The many one-liners and barstool insights keep the characters vivid and the story hurtling forward. It is a story that benefits from a healthy suspension of disbelief. Serendipitous twists abound and, as Dock Bass remarks, “an all-star cast of eccentrics and undesirables,” remarkable as they are unlikely, come out of the small town’s woodwork. There’s Thaddeus St. John, the dandy, crooked antique dealer, and Stonewall Martin, his brutish, unhygienic sidekick. There’s Klaus Gabor, the Hungarian history professor with a tiresome accent (all his w’s end up v’s) and limited grasp of English idioms.

Then there are the two main women of the story, a TV journalist and an opportunistic drunk, who are pretty much like the men: fast-talking, chain-smoking, hard-drinking folks out to get theirs. But Dock, despite his worn-out macho act and occasionally muddled motivation, is a likable front man. He really wants to do the right thing, and you can’t help but want the guy to come out on top.