THE MAX is the third installment from Hard Case Crime of the Max and Angela series by the transatlantic tag team of Ken Bruen and Jason Starr. Like its predecessors — 2006’s BUST and 2007’s SLIDE — it’s fast, violent, sexy, outrageous fun. In other words, just the thing to fill a late-summer afternoon on the beach, hammock or backyard.
Max Fisher, a former New York CEO reborn as a drug trafficker, has been arrested and sentenced to prison. But he’s outraged to learn that instead of some cushy, white-collar Club Fed, he’ll be doing time at Attica. Max, you see, is powered completely by self-delusion. He absolutely reeks of it. But just as he fears the worst for his fate in prison, stories of a castration/murder he merely witnessed are mistakenly attributed to his actions.
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Come with me back to a time when railroads were the predominant form of transportation, when telephones were newfangled, when the mail was delivered four times a day, when streetlamps were gaslit, and it was the Age of Steam. Go back to the year 1906 as envisioned by Andrew Martin in his THE LOST LUGGAGE PORTER, and lose yourself in this engrossing tale of the North Eastern Railway and newly appointed railway detective Jim Stringer.
Stringer is now an official detective at the York Station (he was an amateur in the first two books of the series, THE NECROPOLIS RAILWAY and THE BLACKPOOL HIGHFLYER), and early on, we see him laboriously reading the police manual cover to cover, hoping to do well on the job. But he’s in for a surprise, as his boss assigns him to deep undercover work, and there is little in the manual on how to behave like a criminal in order to catch criminals.
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Better yet, let’s not go out to the movies! Twelve bucks for a ticket, another $12 to $15 for eats, plus babysitters and parking … then the movie has to compete with other people’s conversations, cell phones, crying babies, shrieking children and talking back to the screen. And for all that, you get maybe two hours of so-called “entertainment.”
Just read the book instead!
It’s practically a given that the blockbuster film du jour — and most lesser epics — will be novelized. A novel based on any film featuring a comic book character is a sure bet. And, more often than you would imagine, the novels are better than the movies they’re based on. Because while a movie takes your eyes places they’ve never seen before (“You’ll believe a man can fly”), a novel transports your mind to deeper and richer places through the power of imagination. Instead of showing the story, the novel tells it, trusting your mind to interpret and visualize the people and events. And your mind’s got an even bigger budget than Warner Bros! A novel can also veer off into diversions such as backstories, providing depth and texture to characters and their motivations.
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A sampling of some of the bizarro search terms with (thankfully) low numbers that brought people to BOOKGASM over the last 30ish days:
• “spuergril batgril sex”
• “no bra needed”
• “dont hassel hoff”
• “girls get damp when excited”
• “submarine porn classic movie -yellow”
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When David Louis Edelman stormed the science fiction scene in 2006 with INFOQUAKE, he created a one-man subgenre: speculative business-management fiction. On that premise, it could have been the most boring novel ever published. At its heart, it was a story about an aspiring businessman’s effort to create a product that would make him the most successful businessman ever, like every crappy biography about Donald Trump or Bill Gates or whoever.
But because of rigorous world-building, meticulous characterization and the way-awesome future technology he created, Edelman wrote a book in which every chance he took paid off handsomely. It was already pegged as part of the JUMP 225 trilogy, so sequels were a given. Enter MULTIREAL.
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