Word: inspector
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...network includes Social Security employees, police officers, private eyes and so-called information brokers, and stretches from New York City and Tampa to Chicago and Seattle. "The problem is widespread, and there's simply no control over who's buying the information," concedes James Cottos, a regional inspector general for the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services...
...information brokers -- usually other private eyes -- who often pay government employees for confidential data that can be gleaned in a matter of seconds. "If you're in a fight with your neighbor, these brokers can get you all the information you , want -- criminal records, earnings records, credit reports," says inspector Cottos. A California sleuth sums up the situation this way: "Look, we can get most of the information that we need in legitimate ways, but that's more expensive and time consuming...
Peter Sellers' Inspector is one of the film world's classic comedic protagonists. Each place and each person who comes into contact with Clouseau becomes helplessly embroiled in the Inspector's mad, inside-out universe of erector-set winged cars, Disguises by Balls, and Cato's Asian Harem. Of course, Herbert Lom, as Clouseau's nemesis on the Paris police force, is unable to snap back from these trips into madness and spends most of the film locked in a padded room...
...Inspector records the four days this lamentable investigation takes, and during most of them, Australian-born Peter Carey is at the top of his form. Best known for Oscar and Lucinda (1988), an inspired account of a pair of star-crossed Victorian lovers, Carey specializes in comic compulsiveness, the obsessions that lonely people in underpopulated landscapes create to give some center to their lives. These fantasies seldom lead to anything but trouble and unexpected consequences. Gran Catchprice's desire to destroy what she and her late husband have built seems understandable, given her original expectations: "The only thing...
Along the way, though, a lot of the fun goes out of this tale of a maladroit family and hapless, unwilling tax inspector. There is a dark and extremely unamusing family secret that has made the Catchprices so miserable and so horrid to one another. What begins as slapstick evolves into tragedy, and Carey does not adequately prepare the ground for this transition. In the end, a reader is left with the uncomfortable sense of having laughed in all the wrong places. If that was Carey's intention, he succeeded, but he should perhaps expect only a muted form...