Well, of course the title of BUST is a double entendre. Would you expect anything less from the pulp purveyors at Hard Case Crime?
Their latest is a first: a dual-authored novel, from rising stars Ken Bruen and Jason Starr, and it’s a raucous, boisterous affair revolving around a middle-aged Internet networking executive named Max, who’s so tired of his cow of a wife and so enamored with the breasts of his young blonde secretary that he plots with the latter to have the former killed. A shady Irishman is hired for the job, and does so, also throwing in a couple of freebies, including a turd on the Victorian carpet. Elsewhere across town rolls Bobby, a wheelchair-bound veteran with a pervo hobby of photographing women as they sunbathe in the park, and a police detective itching for a promotion.
To reveal how everybody figures into the plot would take some of the fizz out of BUST, but let’s just say alliances are forged, felled and fucked. This one’s a real ensemble number of homicide, humor and herpes, nearly on the level of a comic caper like Elmore Leonard’s OUT OF SIGHT. Each character is crazed, but they’re not built with quirk for quirk’s sake; they’re fleshed out (if you’ll pardon the pun) and believable, equipped as they are with their own set of machinations, clothed as they are with masks of duplicity.
Bruen and Starr’s collaboration is mostly successful, though the quotes opening each chapter are tiresome and unnecessary, and the resolution lacks the punch that everything before it suggests it will be. But as expected, it’s never boring and moves along much faster than Drano on deteriorating a human body in the bathtub. Pick it up, sit back, relax and watch BUST go boom. –Rod Lott
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I dunno, I thought the pace was really uneven, rarely suspenseful, and the plot twists too easily decoded well in advance.
I did like the prose itself, and the general idea was interesting, though we’ve read it all before.
Unfortunately, I read the McBain HCC just prior to Bust, and it’s about impossible to follow up on such a legend…
pj
The first page of BUST sizzles and heightened my expectations for a great f’ing read. Nope, that was not to be. It turned into clumsy Elmore Leonard impression.