Slide

Warning: Slide Slide by Ken Bruen, Jason Starr is not for the faint of heart and you'll love it. Totally well written and fun to read. I received a copy as a gift. The story is tight and is a continuation from the first book "Bust." (Also a great book that is worthy of 5 stars). Slide is about a crazy serial killer who calls himself by that name and naturally, gets mixed up with Max aka "the Max" Fischer and his erstwhile sidekick, the beautiful and cunning Angela Petrakos. It's a roller-coaster ride as this bizzare triangle unfolds and the bodies start to drop. Some of the most colorful characters ever. Great dark humor abounds. Enjoy~!

Ken Bruen is one of my favorite authors and when my son gave me this book, I was quite pleased. Having devoured it in one day, I'm very glad to have gotten it. This is a roller coaster ride of a book, funny, foul, serious and just a great way to spend some time. The two authors are obviously having a great bit of fun in this writing. That's obvious when one of the very minor characters appears to be modeled after Ken Bruen, in a short but hilarious scene. All of the folks in this book are well drawn, and they all have their own funny ways, even though some of them have tragic ends. I laughed out loud as I kept turning the pages, and every so often I had to bother my wife and son with listening to some of the tremendous lines. The sequence of sentences about Riverdance just cracked me up, and them also! I'd never heard of this series of books (Hard Case Crime) before, but i certainly intend to make acquiring them a priority in my house, so that all of us can read these tales, and laugh ourselves silly!

It was more by accident than by design that I've been reading Ken Bruen and Jason Starr's "Max Fisher" trilogy in reverse. First I read The Max, which may or may not be the final volume. I've yet to read the first novel, Bust. In the middle, there is Slide, the subject of this review. The main character in Slide is Max Fisher, who as the story begins, is in a bad situation. For some reason, the New York resident is in the middle of Alabama with no recollection as to how he got there (and no money either). Max is a middle-aged businessman who loves to live the fast life and is both blessed and cursed with an enormous ego. Convinced of his own invulnerability, Max gets into all sorts of trouble, but his egoism also gives him an almost delusional level of self-confidence that makes it seem like there's no situation he can't get out of. Sure enough, Max is soon back in New York and starting a new life as a crack dealer to the white collar set. He's living the gangster life (as he's picked up from the movies), complete with a live-in sushi chef and full-time prostitute. Unfortunately, he also has a cop out to get him (for reasons linked to the first book, Bust). Meanwhile, Max's ex-lover, Angela Petrakos has her own scams going in Ireland and becomes hooked up with an aspiring serial killer who wants to go to the U.S. to really become famous in his field. Max and Angela may be in almost two different plots, but you know they will intersect again by the end. Slide is another excellent work by Bruen and Starr, filled with dark humor and over-the-top characters. I wouldn't necessarily recommend reading these three books in reverse, but it does add a certain twist: I knew where Slide would wind up, but not how it would get there; indeed, the ride was as much fun as the eventual destination, a worthy standard for any novel.

Just when I thought that Bruen and Starr had written one amazing noir masterpiece in the form of "BUST" they do it again. I was overjoyed reading that novel because it felt like it would give Elmore Leonard and Tarantino a run for their money. Then, without warning, they created the "Godfather Part II" of sequels in the form of "Slide"!!!! When last we left our buddy Max Fisher, he was suspected of his wife's and his niece's murder (which he did), his business was in the toilet, he was being blackmailed, he was drinking heavily, he was being questioned for the death of a cop, and he even got herpes from his girlfriend, who went back to Ireland. In "Slide" things go from worse to #@(*$ & ing god awful. He thinks hes got it made by becoming a mid level crack dealer, but not to give anything away, everything goes sideways real quick. Another A+ for these two freaks.

Following up where Bust leaves off, Slide is a rollicking good time ride with two of the main protagonists from the first book; Max Fisher, a hustler so driven he hustles himself first, and Angela Petrakos, a VERY calculating accomplice. They are joined by a plethora for characters who are well writ and capture the zeitgeist of a culture shot through with drugs, absolute worship of money, and the worst excesses of popular culture. There are so many great lines in this book. Bruen has always been good at the throwaway gem, but Starr seems to have kicked him up to a whole new level. Dozens of times in the book Max starts to get a clue that maybe he isn't quite as a) appealing to women, b) controlled in his use of drugs, or c) quite the criminal mastermind he conceives himself to be. But then with a wonderful turn of phrase he dismissed any self doubt and jumps back in on his own Teflon chuted sleigh ride to hell. Only George Pelecanos does these wry asides as well, although Starr/Breun's drip with sarcasm as opposed to the irony of Pelecanos. But then, the authors are on very different missions with their works. Of course, there has to be another protagonist and Starr and Bruen introduced Slide, a captivating, totally amoral psychopath who has delusional problems of his own. The plot that ensues is just this side of far fetched, just this side of madcap, and a heck of a lot of fun. I read this book on a 6 hour flight from Newark to San Francisco, and laughed for the whole three hours it took to read. So it is a lot of fun, but if you step back and think about it, it takes damn good writers to publish something this tightly plotted, this economical with words, and this ironic. Not only a great read, but also a very well constructed work. If you read this, you must read Bust first, or you will miss a lot of the plot.