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Money Shot starts with a bang, with the heroine left for dead, shot and tied up and locked in the trunk of a car, struggling to break free. She’s Angel Dare, a middle-aged former porn star who now runs an adult modeling agency. An old friend from her porn days called her up and begged her for a favor, and things went downhill from there. Once she’s out of the car, she ends up on the run and looking for revenge…
Faust is a former pro dominatrix and peep show girl, and the way she writes about the porn and sex work business is wildly different from the way male writers who’ve never been involved in it, except maybe as a customer, do. The content is the same, but the attitude is wildly different; the gaze isn’t on women as objects, but on women as people.
The sex and porn workers are sharply evaluated in both human terms and how they approach their work; the consumers are examined with an even more merciless eye, to see what buttons to push to extract money while avoiding violence. But it’s not purely monetary or purely subsistence work; sexuality is also something Dare enjoys and is driven by and understands.
The world is dark, dark, darker than black. If someone seems awful, they are. If they seem okay, ten to one they either die or betray you. People are used and abused, bought and sold. But the prose style and insider’s attitude and Dare’s hard-bitten, wiseass narration made this a book I read in a single gulp.
He looked like one of the first three guys the hero has to fight before he can get to the real bad guy.
A dominatrix specializing in medical kink, whom Angel gets taken to for medical care since she can’t go to the cops, remarks of her security man, “I removed a bullet from his right thigh two years ago. That was amazing. Well, for me, anyway.”
Money Shot (Hard Case Crime Book 40)
Faust is a former pro dominatrix and peep show girl, and the way she writes about the porn and sex work business is wildly different from the way male writers who’ve never been involved in it, except maybe as a customer, do. The content is the same, but the attitude is wildly different; the gaze isn’t on women as objects, but on women as people.
The sex and porn workers are sharply evaluated in both human terms and how they approach their work; the consumers are examined with an even more merciless eye, to see what buttons to push to extract money while avoiding violence. But it’s not purely monetary or purely subsistence work; sexuality is also something Dare enjoys and is driven by and understands.
The world is dark, dark, darker than black. If someone seems awful, they are. If they seem okay, ten to one they either die or betray you. People are used and abused, bought and sold. But the prose style and insider’s attitude and Dare’s hard-bitten, wiseass narration made this a book I read in a single gulp.
He looked like one of the first three guys the hero has to fight before he can get to the real bad guy.
A dominatrix specializing in medical kink, whom Angel gets taken to for medical care since she can’t go to the cops, remarks of her security man, “I removed a bullet from his right thigh two years ago. That was amazing. Well, for me, anyway.”
Money Shot (Hard Case Crime Book 40)
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(I love your reviews, although I seldom comment.)
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This contains ALL the triggers, by the way, including abuse of teenage girls.
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This is the case in all three of Faust's noirs that I've read, but I still find all three of them worth reading.
(There's a sequel to Money Shot, Choke Hold, and an earlier, unrelated novel in a semi-sf milieu of Mexican masked wrestling, Hoodtown. I'm not sure I'd classify her first novel, Control Freak, as a noir so much as a sexual coming-out story with some murders shot through it. I have tragically never read her lesbian pulp novel Butch Fatale, Dyke Dick: Double-D Double Cross because last I checked it was e-book-only, which I still resent.)
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Amazing title!!
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I would have bought it years ago if it existed in print!
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Fbeg bs. Fur xvyyf gur zra jub jrer erfcbafvoyr sbe genfuvat ure yvsr, erfphrf fbzr frk genssvpxrq grrantref, naq gnxrf pbageby bs ure bja yvsr. Ohg va gur cebprff, ure ohfvarff vf qrfgeblrq, fbzr bs ure sevraqf ner xvyyrq, naq fur trgf orgenlrq ol fbzr crbcyr fur gehfgrq.
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*
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Plus, one of my top ten Hard Case Crime covers!
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Agreed!
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It reminds me a little of Heinlein in a good way. Something about the attitude and the respect for details.
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The tone becomes less Heinleinish, but there are enough similarities (the emergency locker, Jesse's fate is like the end of "__If This Goes On_", really hating someone is like a crush) that I bet Christina Faust is a fan.