Shake Your Money Maker

Money Shot
Christa Faust
Hard Case Crime, January 2008

Angel Dare is a retired porn star who runs a booking agency for girls in the industry. She agrees to do a scene in a new movie as a favor her old friend Sam, but things go bad and Angel is left for dead in the trunk of a Honda Civic. Now she’s back and out for revenge. There is just one problem: the bad guys have set things up so it looks like Angel is a murderer and child pornographer. Angel has to dodge the cops while trying to find out who has destroyed her life.

Faust, the first woman ever published by Hard Case Crime, is an amazing talent—and how can you not love an author who references H.G. Wells and Jenna Jameson in the same novel? She gets readers so deeply inside her protagonist’s head that it is impossible not to share Angel’s feelings of desperation and hatred. We can’t wait for her to punish these scumbags. More, we want her to be able to get away and start over somehow.

The novel’s other great strength is its unflinching look at the adult entertainment industry and the way in which it both feeds and feeds off of American culture. Money Shot is full of the social insights that made the works of writers like John D. MacDonald more than “just” crime novels. It’s also good bloody, sexy fun.