‘Money Shot’ – Angel Dare #1 by 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.

Here’s how Christa Faust describers herself on her website

Christa Faust grew up in New York City, in the Bronx and Hell’s Kitchen. She’s been making stuff up her whole life, and spent most of her teen years on endless subway rides, cutting school and scribbling stories.

After High School finally had enough of her, she worked in the Times Square peep booths and later as a fetish model and professional Dominatrix.

She sold her first short story when she moved to Los Angeles in the early 90s. After nearly 20 years in her beloved adopted city, she still considers herself an expat rather than a native.

She’s an avid reader and collector of vintage paperbacks, a Film Noir enthusiast and a Tattooed Lady. She writes primarily Hardboiled crime fiction, but also does work-for-hire media tie in novels. She doesn’t plan to stop any time soon.