So.

I've been away from blogging for a while. Miss me? Be honest now. Things are looking up here, job-wise and health-wise, and that means I'll do a better job of keeping up with ol' Bitter Water Blog.

Last month, I talked about setting up a separate blog just for book reviews and author interviews. I even asked you guys to come up with a name for the thing. The deal was that I'd pick a winner and award him or her a copy of Sam Millar's The Dark Place.

Well, I'm going to stick with having just one blog, as that seems more than enough to occupy my spare time right now. But that doesn't mean I've forgotten about you people who submitted blog titles for the contest. I threw all of your names into a hat and drew out two. That's right, I have two copies of The Dark Place and I'm giving them to...

Kieran Shea and Alan Griffiths. Send me an e-mail with your mailing address and I'll get them out to you right away (or what passes for right away in my world).

Watch this space for reviews and interviews (including Sam Millar) over the next few weeks.

Thanks for hanging around.

Muckle Onto a Free Copy of UNCAGE ME

Want to win a free copy of Uncage Me? Of course you do. Who wouldn't? Well, Terrie Farley Moran has one to give away at the Women of Mystery blog. She also says some nice things about my story, "Welcome to Wal-Mart, Motherfucker." Go on over there for all the details. The entry deadline is this Saturday.

I've Never Been Called "Top Quality" Before...

Blogging at Women of Mystery, the perspicacious Terry Farley Moran has many nice things to say about Uncage Me, including this: "I was delighted to see so many top quality contributors: Declan Burke, Tim Maleeny, J.D. Rhoades and Patrick Shawn Bagley to name a few."

Among her favorite pieces in the anthology is Steven Torres' "The Biography Stoop, the Thief." I agree it's a great story and, given just how much reviewers seem to dig it, I'll be surprised if it fails to garner Steven a few award nominations next year.

Terry plans on raffling off a copy of Uncage Me next month, so check back at Women of Mystery for further details. Of course, you could always buy a copy from your local independent bookseller (or order online). No pressure. I'm just saying.

Uncage Me Reviewed at BSC

Over at Bookspot Central, the infamous Nerd of Noir has given his blood-stained seal of approval to Uncage Me. His Nerdness says, "A whole fucking fleet of the Nerd’s personal faves are writing sans-fucking-abandon in Uncage Me. Favorite novelists Allan Guthrie, Scott Phillips, Victor Gischler, and Christa Faust are rocking the fuck alongside short story extrordinaires like Greg Bardsley, Patrick Shawn Bagley, and Stephen Blackmoore...The range in this motherfucker is simply from rock-solid to fucking brilliant." You can read the full review here.

Spinetingler

The spring '09 issue of Spinetingler is live, locked and loaded. This time around, there's new fiction by Anthony Rainone, Stephen D. Rogers, Fiona Kay Crawford, Graham "Crimespot" Powell and others. Sandra Ruttan interviews Russel D. McLean. Jim Napier talks with Phyllis Smallman. Brian Lindenmuth grills Craig McDonald. There are reviews of books by Linda L. Richards, Sean Chercover, Tom Schreck and more, more, more. All of that, plus an excerpt of Declan Burke's hard-hitting novel The Big O.

Short Houses with Wide Porches

There is an excellent review of Christopher Watkins' debut poetry collection, Short Houses with Wide Porches, at the Hayden's Ferry Review blog. Reviewer Meghan Brinson writes, "the relish with which the language of these poems captures and caresses the seen world is a reminder that though there may never be enough time to experience every detail of the ever-changing world, there is, however, enough time to enjoy it."

Carl Brookins Digs UNCAGE ME

Carl Brookins, author of several mystery novels, read Uncage Me without flinching. You can check out his insightful review here.

Hat tip to Stephen Blackmoore.

Hit List

Hit List: The Best of Latino Mystery
Edited by Sarah Cortez and Liz Martínez
Arte Público Press, 2009 ($19.95)

I’m always wary of any anthology that purports to present the “best” of anything. Editors who set such a high literary mark often fail to reach it. However, Hit List: The Best of Latino Mystery delivers seventeen top-notch stories by established and lesser-known writers. Among my favorites in this anthology are Manuel Ramos' "The Skull of Pancho Villa," Carolina Garcia-Aguilera's "The Right Profile" and "In the Kitchen with Johnny Albino" by Richie Narvaez. I'm a sucker for Steven Torres' Precinct Puerto Rico novels, so the inclusion of a Luis Gonzalo story was a great treat. There's also a Chico Santana story by A.E. Roman. This was my first exposure to Roman's fiction, and it has me looking forward to his debut novel, Chinatown Angel.

As co-editor Sarah Cortez notes in her introduction, the stories in Hit List run the range from hardboiled to cozy. While I don't much care for the latter, this antho's strength is that it offers a good sampling of Latino crime writing to suit just about any taste. Do these short stories truly represent the “best” of Latino mystery? I don't know. But it's a damn fine anthology that deserves to be read, passed around, and read again.

Publishers Weekly on UNCAGE ME

They didn't mention my story, but I didn't expect they would since I'm one of those "unfamiliar names." I can only hope that "Welcome to Wal-Mart, Motherfucker" wasn't one of the stories they considered "duds." Overall, it's a good review.


Uncage Me
Edited by Jen Jordan. Bleak House (www.bleakhousebooks.com), $24.95 (296p) ISBN 978-1-60648-015-1; $14.95 paper ISBN 978-1-60648-016-8

While John Connolly (The Reapers) rightly notes in his introduction that this all-original anthology isn't for the fainthearted, noir lovers will find plenty to savor among the 22 stories from both familiar and unfamiliar names. Steven Torres offers the most moving selection, “The Biography of Stoop, the Thief,” in which a 14-year-old boy tries to save the mother who abandoned him for a life on the streets as a substance abuser. Tim Maleeny's “Prisoner of Love” not only features twists and betrayals but manages to make an ambiguous resolution satisfying rather than frustrating. There are some duds, like Maxim Jakubowski's shocker “We Mate in the Dark,” with its pointless savagery, but on the whole the contributors demonstrate the ability to create believable and memorable characters as well as settings in a few pages. (July).

Review ©2009 Publishers Weekly.

An Unpublished Review

I was cleaning out some old files this morning when I came across this book review I wrote almost two years ago. It was written for a magazine that never used it. Re-reading the piece now, for the first time since I turned it in, I don’t think it’s all that bad.

Slide
Ken Bruen and Jason Starr
October 2, 2007
Hard Case Crime/Dorchester

When last we saw Max Fisher and Angela Petrakos (in Bust, 2006), their fortunes had taken a nosedive. Max lost his computer company and narrowly escaped a murder rap for the deaths of his wife and her cousin. After learning the hard way that immersion in Drano is not the best method of dissolving a corpse and that wheelchair-ridden metalheads sometimes have issues, Angie swiped ten grand from Max and high-tailed it to Ireland. As Slide opens, both of these characters are lower than they’ve ever been.

Max wakes up hung over in an Alabama motel room with no memory of how he got there. His wallet is empty. His ass is sore, and the Chinese guy the clerk says he checked in with is long gone. Max’s brilliant plan for getting back to Manhattan is to mug the chambermaid and hop a Greyhound.

Angie is in Ireland, down to her last few Euros. Tired of waiting for a rich man to come along and give her a nice home and happy children, she decides to be more aggressive. Unfortunately, the man she targets, a guy who calls himself Slide, is in the kidnapping business. Slide hasn’t had much success as a kidnapper, mostly because he keeps butchering his victims. Angie doesn’t know this, though. When Slide suggests kidnapping Keith Richards, she goes along with the plan. It sounded like a good idea after all that Jameson’s.

Max sets himself up as a crack dealer, getting his stuff from an evangelical Southerner. He’s back on top, living in a penthouse, rolling in money and insisting everyone call him “The M.A.X.” He has even found a silicone-enhanced replacement for Angie (whom he hates but can’t stop thinking about). Things go sour when some Colombians demand a meeting and Max’s new girlfriend gets ideas of her own.

Slide and Angie come to the States when things get too hot in Ireland, the Keith Richards job having gone balls-up. Slide tries to go native, figuring it will help him fulfill his dream of becoming a famous serial killer. For a while, Angie believes Slide will set her up in a big house, just like in The Sopranos. She leaps to a few faulty conclusions about her new man, but he turns out be even worse than she’d imagined.

Bruen and Starr once again prove that they are the masters of dark humor and even darker motives. The characters will often make you laugh out loud, but you are never allowed to forget that these are bad motherfuckers; while you’re laughing, you’re also feeling a twinge of unease in your guts.

Two of the funniest moments come in the brutal killings of a pair of well-known crime writers. One, “a thin figure, leather jacket, shades, white hair, skinny as a rodent, lined face,” gets greased in Dublin. The other, a guy with “long straight hair, a strong jaw—kind of looked like a poor man’s Fabio,” meets his end behind a Dumpster in New York. The writers are never named, but you’ll figure out their identities.

The prose is as taut as piano wire digging into your neck. The dialogue burns. Max and Angie cross paths once again, but not in a way you will expect. Slide is one of those rare sequels that lives up to the excellence of its predecessor and, at times, surpasses it. Best of all, Bruen and Starr have left room for a third novel. Let us hope these twisted noir geniuses team up again soon.

God's Middle Finger

Against the advice of his friends and people who know the area, British writer Richard Grant takes it into his head to travel alone through the Sierra Madre and chronicle the experience. The result is God's Middle Finger: Into the Lawless Heart of the Sierra Madre (The Free Press, 2008), a book that combines ethnography and history with the Tim Cahill school of gonzo travel writing. In other words, it's a fun, compelling read full of narrow escapes and real-life characters who would feel right at home in a Charles Portis novel.

Grant drives into a world that hasn't changed much since the days of B. Traven's Treasure of the Sierra Madre. If anything, it's become more dangerous for a gringo on his own: lions and bears roam the high country, Tarahumara groups struggle against logging industry thugs for land rights, narcotraficantes rule the mountains, bandits haunt the roads, corrupt cops and trigger-happy army units enforce justice for the highest bidder. Grant gets a first-hand education in the region's problems and talks with reticent locals, starry-eyed American aid workers, pot growers, expatriates, farmers, widows and crooks. He eats their food, drinks their beer, smokes their dope, snorts their coke and listens to their stories.

In a place where arguments are resolved with AK-47s, Grant does his best to ask questions without giving offence, but doesn't always pull it off. In fact, some of the book's best moments come when he is afraid for his life. That's not to say there aren't any good people in these pages. There are quite a few, without whom Grant would not have gotten more than a couple of days into his journey.

God's Middle Finger is a hell of a trip. Grant's prose hits like a shot of lechuguilla. He has delivered a book that makes readers long to travel the Sierra Madre themselves while feeling fortunate to be safe at home. It also takes a lot of our arrogant, comfortable assumptions about life in Mexico, turns them upside down and slaps the shit out of them. As Grant writes near the end: "...here I was getting my kicks and curing my ennui in a place full of poverty and suffering, environmental and cultural destruction, widows and orphans from a slow-motion massacre. I tried to persuade myself that I was going to write something that would make a difference and help these people, but my capacity for self-delusion refused to stretch in that direction."

Ray Dudgeon Returns

Trigger City by Sean Chercover
William Morrow, $23.95

When I finished reading Sean Chercover’s Big City, Bad Blood last year, I wondered how he could follow up such a strong debut novel. He put his protagonist Ray Dudgeon, one of the most original PI-types to come down the pike in a long time, through a physical and emotional wringer. I’ve never been to Chicago, but Chercover made it live for me on every page. Big City, Bad Blood was one of the best novels I read in 2007.

Well, no worries about sophomore slump because Trigger City, the second Ray Dudgeon novel, is even better. Dudgeon is still recovering from injuries he suffered during the events of the previous book. His principles have cost him clients and made new enemies. He needs money to pay for surgery on his shoulder. Enter Isaac Richmond, who wants Dudgeon to uncover the truth—no matter how unpleasant—about his murdered daughter’s life. Ray doesn’t want to take the case, but the $50K retainer is hard to pass up. The deeper he digs, the further Dudgeon sinks into the shadowy world of covert intelligence and government corruption.

Sean Chercover is a powerful, gifted writer who knows his stuff. He’s exactly what the PI genre needs right now. I predict he will be as influential to the next generation of crime writers as Robert B. Parker was thirty years ago.

Once You’ve Had Black…

Paying for It by Tony Black
Preface/Random House (July 2008)
ISBN 978-1-84809-020-0
£16.99 Cloth

Gus Dury used to be a hotshot investigative reporter. Now he’s a soon-to-be-divorced, unemployed drunk living in a cheap flat above an Edinburgh pub. Col, the owner of the pub, asks Gus for a favor. Col’s son Billy has been tortured and murdered in what the cops dismissed as a gang killing. Gus is reluctant, but he owes Col a favor. Before long, Gus is in deep shit, crossing paths with bent cops, human traffickers, a woman trying to work every angle and the sleazy politician who cost him his job and—as a result—his marriage. If he’s careful, Gus might just have a chance to regain a semblance of his old life. Then again, he might end up like Billy.

If you’ve read Tony Black’s short stories for e-zines like Spinetingler or Plots with Guns, you know his writing hits like a sharp jab to the gut. His Edinburgh is a darker place than Ian Rankin’s, and that’s saying something. In Black’s hands, the city is more like Ken Bruen’s Galway.

Nor is that the only similarity between Black and Bruen. Inevitably, readers will compare Gus Dury with Jack Taylor. Both men lost their job after decking a government official. Both take shelter in booze or drugs. Like Taylor, Dury is quick to use his fists and is just as likely to end up in the emergency room as a result. Both know the law has little to do with justice.

But Dury is no Jack Taylor clone, and Tony Black, though clearly influenced by Bruen, writes with his own strong voice. While Taylor’s life tends to spiral further downward with each novel, Dury might be able to pull himself up out of the tidal wave of misery. Or maybe not, since the title of the next book in this series is Gutted. Does that refer to a killer who disembowels his victims or is does it reflect the way Dury will feel by the end of the case? I like to see writers run their characters through the meat grinder, so I’m good either way. It's the whole that-which-does-not-kill-us-makes-for-damn-fine-entertainment thing.

Tony Black is the real noir deal and Paying for It is one hell of a debut.

Forgotten Books Friday

Hell House
by Richard Matheson (1971)

Fall is my favorite season and Halloween is the best holiday of them all. To get into the spirit, I’ll devote my next couple of Fridays posts to rereading some novels that I consider overlooked classics of horror. I can’t think of a better way to kick off the Halloween season than by visiting Richard Matheson’s Hell House.

The Belasco House in Caribou Falls, Maine is the “Mt. Everest of haunted houses.” For years a haven for acts so depraved they would have made Caligula lose his lunch, the mansion earned its title of Hell House after all of Belasco’s guests were found dead of various nasty causes. The body of Emeric Belasco was never discovered, though some believe that he or his spirit still haunts the house forty-three years later. An aging bazillionaire has recently bought the house, and he offers one hundred thousand dollars for proof (one way or the other) of life after death.

Enter Professor Lionel Barrett and the best anti-spook technology that 1970 has to offer. Barrett, who makes Egon from Ghostbusters look like a wannabe, is out to prove once and for all that ghosts are merely a form of electromagnetic radiation left behind when a person dies. His Reversor is designed to set up a countercharge that will “clear the house.”

Barrett is accompanied by his wife Edith—a woman with more repressed desires than the priest at an all-boys parochial school—and a pair of mediums. Florence Tanner is the leader of the Temple of Spiritual Harmony. She hopes to commune with and free the spirits trapped within the house; the big paycheck will also make it possible for she and her followers to build a real church. Benjamin Franklin Fischer is known as one of the most powerful mediums in the world. He is also the sole survivor of an earlier attempt at uncovering the mystery of Belasco House. Fischer has spent years trying to drown his power in alcohol and hide from the past, but events in the house force him to fight back.

Hell House is one of the best works by the true master of horror. Fear oozes from its pages. Richard Matheson’s other books include I Am Legend, What Dreams May Come, A Stir of Echoes and The Beardless Warriors. He was also one of the writers for the original Twilight Zone series and huge influence on some guy named Stephen King.

As always, you can check out the full list of today’s forgotten books recommendations on Patti Abbott’s blog.

Stuff

Last week, I interviewed for a job that interested me and paid decent money (a rare combination around here). I thought the interview went well, but I got a “thanks but no thanks” letter in Saturday’s mail. I’m just finishing up a freelance copyediting assignment and I’ve picked up some freelance writing work with a monthly paper, but a job with regular hours and steady pay would have helped solve a couple of money problems.

The high point of the weekend was receiving a signed copy of Kelly Link’s latest collection, Pretty Monsters. The inscription reads “For Patrick from a fan. Love, Kelly.” How cool is that? If you haven’t experienced Kelly’s slipstreamy genius, then you’re missing out on some beautifully disturbing stories.

I wrote the opening scene of the new novel yesterday. Felt damn good.

It was difficult not to turn last Thursday night’s class into a lecture on James Crumley. I settled for reading aloud the opening line of The Last Good Kiss and talking briefly about its place in the crime fiction canon.

A couple of things coming up on the blog this week: my review of Tony Black’s debut novel, Paying for It; my review of Sandra Ruttan’s The Frailty of Flesh; my contribution to Forgotten Books Friday will be Hell House by the great Richard Matheson.

Joan Jett turned 50 yesterday. I remember buying “I Love Rock and Roll” as a 45 in 1982. That was twenty-six years ago? Jesus.

Book Review: HARDLY KNEW HER by Laura Lippman

Hardly Knew Her by Laura Lippman
Introduction by George Pelecanos
William Morrow, $23.95
October 2008

A quick glance through my list of favorite authors reveals that I mostly read books by men. That’s not to say I hold to the Penzlerian notion that women are incapable of writing noir. Ladies like Vicki Hendricks, Megan Abbott and Christa Faust write some of the hardest, darkest crime fiction you’ll ever encounter. Non-crime greats Flannery O’Connor and Annie Proulx have influenced my own work. When I thought about my favorites recently, it troubled me that women were a clear minority. I don’t—at least I like to believe I don’t—pick up or dismiss a book based on the author’s gender. So lately I’ve been making a conscious effort to read more books by women.

Which brings me to Laura Lippman and her short story collection, Hardly Knew Her. I’m a latecomer to Lippman fandom, having previously read just two of her novels (In a Strange City and Every Secret Thing), but I’m trying to make up for lost time. Hardly Knew Her reprints sixteen short stories and delivers a brand-new novella, “Scratch a Woman.” The latter is an amazing piece of writing that Lippman herself describes as “a straight-up homage to James M. Cain.” There are stories about prostitutes, stone-cold soccer moms, snooping babysitters who find more than they bargained for, cheating husbands, drug dealers, and every one of them cuts deep. “The Crack Cocaine Diet” and “Scratch a Woman” are about as noir as noir gets. The title story is a perfect combination of heartache and small, secret triumph. There is darkness (a pair of female Mardi Gras revelers tearing a tough guy to shreds in “Pony Girl”) and bitter humor: Her father was so gullible that he could be duped by Mennonites (from “Hardly Knew Her”). Lippman has a keen eye for society’s quirks and minor faults, as well as its flat-out nasty side.

Hardly Knew Her is one of the finest single-author collections I’ve read in a long time. Get it. Read it. Find some guy who only reads male authors, make him park his ass in a chair and read it. He’ll thank you before he finishes the first story.

Tune in Tomorrow

On tap for Thursday: a quick review of Laura Lippman's forthcoming short story collection, Hardly Knew Her.

On Friday, I'll continue my sporadic participation in Patti Abbott's Forgotten Books project with my take on Craig Nova's Cruisers.

Don't want to miss out on any of that, now do you?

Where the Rivers Flow North (Fridays: The Books You Must Read)

It’s time once again to talk about some great books that you might have missed. You can find the complete list of this week’s participants at the blog of mastermind Patti Abbott.

Where the Rivers Flow North by Howard Frank Mosher (1978)

In this collection of six short stories and the title novella set between the 1920s and the 1970s, Howard Frank Mosher explores the hardships and small victories of life (and death) in Kingdom County, Vermont. Mosher has an eye for describing northeastern Vermont’s stark beauty while at the same time plumbing the depths of characters shaped and hardened by that same landscape.

In “Alabama Jones,” twenty year-old Bill is offered a chance—possibly the only one he’ll ever get—to leave Kingdom County when a girl who sings on the fair circuit spends a few days with him. He wishes he’d never met her because he knows he will never leave.

“First Snow” is the story of two half-brothers with conflicting notions of a man’s responsibility to his family, society and the land he owns. It’s also one my favorites of all Mosher’s stories.

In “Kingdom County Come,” Henry Coville is an old man who grew up working in lumber camps until he went to fight in France during World War One, where he lost a lung during a gas attack. When he got home, the lumber boom had fallen and he took to running bootleg whiskey and working as a hunting guide. “Fifty years went by, went somewhere, and for some reason or perhaps no reason his remaining lung was suddenly decaying like the diseased elms on the village green.” A self-reliant man his entire life, Henry becomes increasingly frail, “annoyed with himself for what he couldn’t help.” But he knows what he has to do while he still has the strength to do it.

There there’s the title novella. “Where the Rivers Flow North” brings us Noël Lord and his “housekeeper,” a Penobscot Indian named Bangor. Noël is another man who talks about leaving his land. In his case, it’s because the Northern Vermont Power Company is building a dam on the river that runs through Noël’s property. He and other old-timers like him will be flooded out if they do not move. Noël takes the power company’s money and makes plans to relocate in Oregon, but he is too closely tied to his land. He has left several times over the years, but has always returned. With the completion of the dam, that will no longer be an option. Bangor is one of Mosher’s greatest characters, and a perfect foil for the taciturn Noël Lord.

Mosher has won many awards over the years and “Where the Rivers Flow North” was made into a movie starring Rip Torn, Tantoo Cardinal and Michael J. Fox. Like Mosher’s books, the film did well with critics but did not gain a wide audience. That’s too bad, because his work is accessible, enjoyable and significant.

I had originally planned to write about Ernest Hebert’s 1979 novel The Dogs of March for this week’s installment. However, Lisa Kenney has already done so (and better than I would have) on her blog. I hope you’ll go there and read what she has to say. The Dogs of March was the first of Hebert’s beautifully dark novels set in his fictional town of Darby, New Hampshire. It’s as good and valuable as anything by Annie Proulx, William Gay, Howard Frank Mosher, the late Ruth Moore, Ivan Doig, Richard Russo or William Kennedy.

Like Where the Rivers Flow North, The Dogs of March was originally published by Penguin, but is currently available from Hardscrabble Press/University Press of New England.

Fridays: The Book You Have to Read

Patti Abbott asked me to take part in a new blog project she’s calling Fridays: The Book You Have to Read. Here’s Patti: “I’m worried that we are letting some great books of the recent past slide out of print and out of our consciousness. Not the first-tier classics we can all name perhaps, but that group of books that comes next.” It’s a great idea that we hope will get people to read books they have somehow overlooked. Not lost classics, exactly; more like missed classics by living authors.

This week’s participating writers are Bill Crider, Josephine Damian, Clair Dickson, Travis Erwin, Sandra Ruttan, Sandra Scoppettone, Anthony Neil Smith, Patti and me. Visit their blogs today, and you're sure to find something good. Patti also asked each of us to tag someone to recommend a book next Friday. So, Declan Burke: consider yourself tagged.

My recommendation is:
The Dog of the South by Charles Portis

Ray Midge’s wife Norma has left him for her ex-husband, a weirdo by the name of Guy Dupree. That wouldn’t be so bad—Ray is a quiet, peace-loving guy and Norma was always badgering him to take her out—if not for the fact that they ran off with Ray’s credit cards, a .410 shotgun he’d had since he was a boy, and his meticulously maintained Ford Torino. Ray waits for the credit card bills to come in so he can track Dupree and Norma.

Driving Dupree’s Buick, which has four mismatched tires, a hole in the floor and engine problems, Ray follows their trail through Texas, then on down to Mexico and eventually to Dupree’s father’s farm in British Honduras. Along the way, Ray runs into a string of delightfully strange characters, not the least of whom is Dr. Reo Symes. On the run himself, Symes is a disgraced physician living in an old broken-down school bus called The Dog of the South. Things go from bad to disastrous for Ray: he runs out of money, a border guard confiscates his pistol, he discovers his beloved Torino in a junkyard and, when he finally gets to the farm, Dupree is crazier than ever and Norma is gone. But it doesn’t end there…

Charles Portis (1933- ) is the author of five novels: Norwood (1965), True Grit (1968), The Dog of the South (1979), Masters of Atlantis (1985) and Gringos (1991). I recommend them all, and I wish the man were more prolific.

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.