The last time we saw Angel Dare, retired porn star turned manager and owner of the Daring Angels agency, she’d just survived a week of being kidnapped, shot at, beaten up and left for dead, (not to mention abducting in return, shooting back and giving as good as she got). She’d been framed for murdering one of her best friends and had lost her reputation, business and everything she’d worked toward and built with her life, but she’d taken her revenge and rescued a handful of eastern-European girls trafficked into the country as sex slaves. She may’ve been headed to prison, but if so, she was going to go on her own terms.
It was a great ending to a fierce crime novel (Money Shot) and I swear I had no idea that Angel would, (could even) be a series character after that one, but goodness gracious brothers and sisters, she’s back in Choke Hold - and here’s how that works:
After the scary international crime-ring that she ran afoul of in Money Shot catch up to her under a her new identity, Angel abandons the witness protection set-up in New England, and at the beginning of Choke Hold, she's a waitress in a dingy diner in the middle of nowhere American Southwest, (remember the diner that Gary Oldman has in Romeo Is Bleeding or the one William Sanderson mercifully pours Robert DeNiro a cup of coffee in in Midnight Run? - that kind of diner. There should be one of those in every book and every movie as far as I'm concerned). She's cooling her heels there, waiting on a forged passport that the gun-nut and current shack-up proprietor is hooking her up with. She’s in the middle of her shift one day when she’s recognized by Thick Vic, a former lover, arriving to meet with his now adult and no longer estranged son, (of all the diners in all the world), but their reunion never gets the chance to go anywhere because the whole place is immediately shot to hell by a trio of coked-up teenagers, (and the aformentioned fire-arm enthusiast who owns the place). Angel, Vic and his son Cody barely escape the diner, and end up on the run from a drug-smuggling fight-promoter and a deformed Croatian gangster.
Where Money Shot was a very urban Los Angeles revenge tale, Choke Hold is a full-throttle road novel that takes us through the dusty barrens of Nevada, California and Mexico on a tour of cheap hotels, smuggler dens, and sleazy fight clubs. This time out Angel is on a protective mission escorting Cody, an aspiring MMA fighter, along a string of bad deals on his way to the big time while staying a half step ahead of the bloody mayhem chewing up the road behind them. Rather than the adult film industry, this time Christa Faust explores another of her favorite subcultures - gladiators - and underlines many of the similarities between the flesh trades, as well as painting compelling character portraits of the kinds of people who are drawn to and destined to work in them.
Faust clearly has some interesting things to say about sexual politics, crime and the modern American psyche, but lucky for us, she never lets her subtext get in the way of a good scene, and that's what she never seems to run out of. Both books are just one memorable scene stacked on top of another till most everybody's dead. Awesome. Starts with a bang, and every chapter ends with one, just the way they oughtta. The Angel Dare books are sure to be future staples for fans of hardboiled fiction and like Craig McDonald’s Hector Lassiter series or Anthony Neil Smith’s Billy Laffitte books, (of which I understand a third is on the way – a prison novel!), each stands on it’s own, while building on it’s predecessor(s), reading experiences are brand new title to title and everything is demanded from their central characters.
I’d love to follow Angel for another run through a new shady subculture or two or three.
Jedidiah Ayres writes fiction and keeps the blog Hardboiled Wonderland.
