Shooting Elvis

I read this a couple years ago and was thinking about it recently and wanted to read another like it. Thankfully Robert has written a sequel, I hope its as good as the last. Adventure, intrigue and a bit of excitement in Shooting Elvis. I enjoyed it and look forward to reading the next one.

Mary Alice Baker is just an ordinary girl from a small Southern California town who's trying hard to be normal. She works in a baby photo studio at the mall and sees the world through her own much darker photography. She has an abusive father and a biker boyfriend. Then she quite unintentionally explodes a bomb at LAX, decides it's time to completely change her life, and becomes Nina Zero. Then things get complicated. As you get farther into this book, the story and Nina's personality both get darker, too, just like her photography. She hooks up with a kitsch artist and a paranoid documentary film-maker, goes to work for a grossly overweight detective, and learns how to handle a revolver. Mary Alice was basically a nice girl in fuzzy sweaters, but Nina is definitely dangerous. It's a fast read, only a little over 200 pages, but the protagonist becomes a very real person, deftly drawn and developed, and you'll care about what happens to her. Also, properly cast, this book would make a terrific movie!

Shooting Elvis is a page turner, okay, and it's funny as hell at times, but the real star of the book is Nina Zero, the heroine, or I should say anti-heroine. Her voice is unique in crime fiction; funny, tough and always yearning for answers that seem to just barely elude her. Her take on things L.A. is priceless.

I finished this book about ten minutes ago, and I have to say it was one of the best books I've read in a really long time. I found myself unable to put it down, reading for the last 4 hours straight (even though I was at work!), it is an irresistible page-turner! The title and the red spine attracted me to it at a clearance sale, and boy, am I glad it did!

Had heard of this author as one of the bright stars in the otherwise bleak expat community of Prague. Although exhibiting a sensationalistic tendency that afflicts too many of today's young writers, Eversz seamlessly weaves a nail-biting adventure with an unlikely heroine. His ability to depict young artists, wayward drifters, and an Orwellian armada kept me turning the pages to discover what lie within the mysterious box. Once discovered, I was astounded at the complexity of a novel that at first read like a Hardy Boys novel. Instead, I found myself likening him to Raymond Chandler. Look forward to his next novel and vampires descending on Gen Xpats?