Christa Faust

The cover and the title... well... they'd normally make me move on without reading the book. Except, this is an original novel published by Hard Case Crime who are famous for their retro covers. This cover was an Anthony Award Nominee for Best Paperback Original and Best Cover Art (2009) and the novel was a Barry Award Nominee for Best Paperback Original (2009)and an Edgar Award Nominee for Best Paperback Original (2009) and besides, I was reading the ebook version so no-one was ever going to see the cover... except you guys of course.

In Money Shot Christa Faust has produced a Hard-boiled crime novel that is very different from the typical macho gumshoe flexing his muscles and firing his gun as he wise-cracks his way to catching the bad guy.

The book opens with our heroine Angel Dare, naked and bound hand and foot in the trunk of a car in a remote lot. She's been left for dead but she's still breathing. A fact that the man who tried to kill her will come to regret.

Angel is a strong woman who has survived being in front of the cameras in the porn industry and gone on to carve a place for herself managing the new generation of talent performing in porn films and gentlemen's clubs through her Daring Angels agency. She knows the challenges that women working in the porn industry face and she does her best to keep her Angels safe while helping everyone to make money, She was satisfied with her business and her life. Until her life was blown up when a close friend betrayed her to ruthless men ready to torture, rape and kill to get what they want.

And that's just the first couple of chapters.

This is not a comfortable or cosy book. It's an unflinching look at some terrible people doing some nasty things. This is a story of a woman coming to understand that her old life is gone, that her friends are either dead or have betrayed her or both and deciding that none of that is going to stop her from killing the men who did this to her.

This isn't the kind of thriller where you sit on the edge of your seat wondering what clever twist is going to allow the heroine to escape in the nick of time. It's the kind of thriller where bad things happening lead to worse things happening until everything is in ruins. It's a story that focuses on trauma and its consequences rather than on complex plots.

What kept me wading through the soulless sex, the vicious violence, the grimly plausible exploitation and the constant bloodshed was Angel Dare herself. She felt very real to me and what happened to her was truly awful. What she did about it wasn't any better. The price she paid for it may even have been worse but I could see it happen.

She's a smart, tough, occasionally witty woman who has survived things that might have broken other people. Christa Faust has given her a unique and relatable voice that kept me moving forward as the plot got darker and darker. Angel often said or thought things that made me smile, like her view on shopping malls:

"I hate malls. They're like strip clubs for women. All tease and sparkle and the empty promise that if you just drop enough cash, somehow you’ll be fulfilled."

The second and, I think last, Angel Dare book is called Choke Hold. I'll be adding it to my TBR list shortly.… (altro)

This review was originally written for my blog http://turnthepage.travel.blog/2019/04/12/the-killing-joke-by-christa-faust-and-...

I saw this movie when it first came out - what Batman fan (or, in my case, Joker fan) didn't? I enjoyed it. I didn't love it, but I didn't feel like I had wasted 80 minutes of my life by watching it. I have never read the comic on which the movie was based, it's on my list though.

This book is set in the year 1988. It tells the story of Batman and Batgirl as they do what they do best - fight crime and try to save Gotham City from a new street drug named Giggle Sniff which is highly addictive and has fatal side effects. The authors do a good job of casually name dropping a lot of well known characters from the Batman series: Alfred, Robin, Maxie Zeus, The Mad Hatter, Killer Croc, Dr. Tompkins, and so on. This book doesn't focus entirely on the protagonists however as it zones in on other characters as each chapter moves the spotlight to someone else.

My first complaint with this book was that despite its title, and despite the movies focus on the Joker, apart from a few brief short chapters early on in the book he's only in this final chapters of this novel. At the start Batman and Batgirl fight Maxie Zeus, then the middle of the book focuses on a drug deal, and the Joker isn't the main concern until the end.

My second complaint is that if you have seen the movie then the book doesn't really add anything of interest. It's not a literal book of the movie, there is some added backstory and it goes further than the ending of the movie, it even clears up the controversy about the films ending (you'll know what I'm talking about if you have seen it). But I felt that it had a lot of filler content that didn't add anything to the story. I feel that this story works well in a more visual format such as a film or a comic, but it did not translate well to a book.

My third complaint, which is very minor, was that I found a few parts of the book very awkwardly written. The fight scene at the start against Maxie's two robotic dogs just felt like "Batman jumped over one dog, kicked the other, then threw a batarang at the first, then punched the other", it was too long and not varied enough for the length. Other sentences were just badly written as if there was a word missing. This did not happen frequently enough that it made the book hard to read, and like I said it was just a minor issue for me.

Overall I'd give this book a 2/5 star rating. I would only recommend it if you really really want to read it, but if you're just a small fan of the series or curious about the story then I'd propose for you to watch the movie instead.… (altro)