The Tax Inspector - Tapa dura

The members of the Cathprice family--eighty-six-year-old matriarch Frieda; her daughter, Cathy; her son, Mort; and her grandson, Benny--find their way of life threatened when the tax inspector arrives for an audit

Catchprice, who runs her family business--and her family--with senility, cunning, and a handbag full of explosives to sixteen-year-old Benny, who dreams of transforming a failing automobile franchise into an empire--and himself into an angel--the Catchprices may be the most spectacularly contentious family since Dostoevsky's Karamozovs.  But when a beautiful and very pregnant agent of the Australian Taxation Office enters their lives, the resulting collision becomes, in Carey's hands, masterpiece of coal-black humour and compassionate horror.