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Angel Dare spent a decade plus in the porn industry doing hardcore shoots with guys with names like "Axl Rod" and "Dix Steele." When she started getting older, she got out, opening her own agency, Daring Angels, managing girls for hardcore video productions and feature dancing, ie, stripping. Sounds pretty sweet, huh? All things considered, it is -- until Angel gets the call from old friend and bigshot porno oldtimer Sam Hammer, tucked away in a mansion in Bel Air shooting a fuck flick that's going swiftly wrong, wrong, wrong. Jesse Black, the hottest stud in porn, is ready for his closeup and getting steadily more pissed off with Sam's flaky female talent. Hammer's got one last chance to get the money shot, and Jesse Black demands Angel or the sumbitch plans to walk.
Once that little fire has been put out, she teams up with her itinerant security guard, Mexican-Irish ex-cop Malloy, to find out WTF, and before long she finds out she's been dragged nonconsensually into a scene between an on-the-run stripper, sleazebag stud Black, certain Eastern European mafia figures, producer Hammer, who racks up the body count as the first of Money Shot's many corpses. Angel is not a detective -- she's a former porn star and independent businesswoman, more worried about crow's feet than stopping power, more about day rates than dodging bullets. But like so many porn stars, when you fuck her, as in fuck her, not fuck her… let's just say she's not happy, and there's a trail of people in Angel's future who will find themselves even less so as she and Malloy pry the lid off of Porn Valley corruption and while they're at it -- if Angel has anything to say about it -- cook up a little corruption of their own. It goes without saying that I read Money Shot in a rush, my eyes glued to the page; the book is nonstop mayhem, violence, prurient interest, shoutin', killin' and carryin' on. There's a stash of greenbacks involved, a road trip to Vegas and a healthy body count, not to mention the steadily pounding pulse of danger that makes a thriller great. Money Shot pours off the pages like cheap rye slurped neat from a motel water glass, and it goes down almost as easy. In fact, this is exactly kind of detective novel about which Raymond Chandler had Phillip Marlowe say in Playback: "I put the paperback in the garbage where it belonged." Marlowe would not approve of Money Shot, but as far as I'm concerned his Puritan ass can lump it. Faust first came to my attention when I was editing a 1996 book called Noirotica; she'd collaborated with Poppy Z. Brite on a sick little morality tale called "Saved," which I ended up including in the book. Known at that time primarily for her involvement in the horror field, Faust was even then spoiling for a detective novel; her sharp-edged prose and nasty sense of humor marked her as a shamushound from the getgo, I suspect not so much out of a sense of justice as a rapturous compulsion toward sex and violence. Fast-forward a dozen years and Faust has produced three irrepressible novels I loved: Control Freak, Triads (another collaboration with Brite), and my personal favorite, Hoodtown, a weird-crime Lucha Libre noir hybrid packed with sex, violence and a hyperreal flavor.
Money Shot is also a traditional thriller, following the doomed-and-the-damned formula laid down by geniuses of American letters like Cornell Woolrich, Ed McBain, David Goodis, Mickey Spillane and Lawrence Block in many of their pulpiest, and often forgotten, works -- many of which, not incidentally, are being reprinted by Hard Case Crime, Money Shot's publisher. In fact, Faust dedicates Money Shot to Richard S. Prather, whose brilliant Shel Scott mystery novels have been unjustly forgotten with the best of them. The novels that form the backbone of both Hard Case's line and the entire roman noir genre were not intended to be great literature; these cats were punching a time clock, pumping out the rent, telling lurid tales of urban doom and destruction, and that in doing so they just happened to codify the zeitgeist of unsavory obsession and write the midcentury American male fakebook makes these novels among the most important works of great literature that 99% of Lit professors have never, and will never, read, which is their loss. Money Shot, set in Porn Valley's back alleys, strip malls and cheap motels, is more than just a worthy addition to the tradition of brilliant writing behind cheesy covers; it's also an evocation of the female zeitgeist in hardboiled noir. Most importantly, though, it's a couple hundred pages of the nastiest fun you'll ever have, with a healthy slug of gorgeous writing inserted when you least expect it. Put it in the garbage, where it belongs, then buy eight more copies and give them to your sleaziest friends. You can purchase Christa Faust's Money Shot online or at your town's most disreputable bookstore, and find out more about her at christafaust.com.
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