Full Throttle: a review of Christa Faust's Choke Hold.
From Tue., 23 July 2013 through Sun., 28 July 2013, I read Christa Faust's novel Choke Hold (London: Hard Case Crime [Titan Books, a division of Titan Publishing Group, Ltd.], 2011; 256 pgs.; ISBN: 0857682857) on my Kindle.
Choke Hold is the sequel to Christa Faust's first book for the Hard Case Crime imprint, Money Shot, featuring the ex-porn star turned owner of a talent agency for women in the adult entertainment industry, Angel Dare (this is her professional name). Following the calamitous events of Money Shot, Angel is a fugitive on the run, using a series of false identities, trying to escape the clutches of the one rat bastard she didn't kill, who has somehow compromised the new identity that the U.S. Marshals WitSec program established for her. Within the first two chapters of Choke Hold, Angel runs into an ex-boyfriend who starred in porn movies under the name of "Thick Vic" Ventura, sees her current inamorata of convenience, a "firearms enthusiast" who owns the diner in Yuma, Arizona that she currently works at, get killed, sees Vic get fatally injured shortly after reuniting with his 18-year-old son, Cody, at said diner, and has Vic extract a promise from her before he dies to watch out for Cody, who turns out to be an MMA fighter hoping to enter a reality TV tournament in Las Vegas. Given that the "firearms enthusiast" was her middleman in her attempt to secure a fake passport so that she could flee the country and the Croatian goons who are out for revenge following the events in Money Shot, this is a complication that Angel does not exactly welcome.
While Choke Hold starts out at a breakneck pace, it soon idles down into a long stretch of doldrums, although it manages to pick up speed in its last third. If anything, the ending of Choke Hold is even more balls-to-the-wall than that of Money Shot; while I can just imagine, barely, a U.S. movie adaptation of Money Shot, there's no way in hell that any Hollywood studio would touch Choke Hold with a barge pole: the ending is too bleak, and the incidents that fill the book are too sordid and squicky for a Hollywood long past the bad-boy swagger that ran from 1969's Midnight Cowboy to 1980's Cruising. It would take a European director to tackle Choke Hold without significantly diluting it; maybe Gaspar Noé or Nicholas Winding Refn.
Choke Hold suffers from more editorial errors than Money Shot did, possibly due to the kerfuffle of the Hard Case Crime line switching publishers: a Bonneville is referred to as a Buick instead of a Pontiac in Chapter 3 ("I'm sure there were seatbelts somewhere in that old Buick..."); the word "nauseous" is continuously used to indicate that Angel feels nauseated (unfortunately, "nauseous" appears to be well on the way to have the same meaning as feeling nauseated one's own self, rather than its original meaning of causing others to feel nauseated, at least in American English); a bullet is described, in Chapter 5, as looking "like a tiny hardon" instead of "like a tiny hard-on"; Lalo Malloy, from Money Shot, is referred to here as "an old friend," when he decidedly wasn't (he'd only been working for Angel's talent agency for a couple of months before she was obliged to call on him for help; they parted as something both more and less than friends); and there are several incorrect compound words used instead of hyphenated words, such as, in Chapter 12, "largebreasted instead of "large-breasted," "bigbreasted" instead of "big-breasted," and "passedout" instead of "passed-out."
But by far the biggest editorial and authorial mistake of Choke Hold is the soft-soaping of the conclusion of its predecessor, Money Shot; quite frankly, I remain incredulous that Angel didn't "[go] down for multiple murder," even if she did "testify against a bunch of scumbags who were importing underage Eastern Bloc girls for sex" (Chapter 14). Angel is an interesting and fun character, and I can well understand the temptation to revisit her that the author and publisher faced; but whatever shred of believability that Money Shot managed to retain after its nearly Grand Guignol finale is thrown out the window by this single incredible, though necessary, precondition to set up Choke Hold. It would've been better had Choke Hold been set even longer after the conclusion of Money Shot, and had Angel actually served some time for her actions in Money Shot, which included at least two instances of cold-blooded murder.
A final word of advice to the prospective reader of Choke Hold: as with Money Shot, Angel's (at this point) former profession and still-current proclivities are apt to put some readers off of her, as she is sex-positive, and therefore unapologetic for having been a porn actress and head of a talent agency representing porn actresses, or for "letting [her] pussy drive," to cite a line from the penultimate paragraph of Chapter 11. It's a sad commentary on the perceived "acceptable" roles for women in American society that what would pass with a yawn in a male character is a matter of some controversy in a female character.
*Cross-posted to LibraryThing.
Choke Hold is the sequel to Christa Faust's first book for the Hard Case Crime imprint, Money Shot, featuring the ex-porn star turned owner of a talent agency for women in the adult entertainment industry, Angel Dare (this is her professional name). Following the calamitous events of Money Shot, Angel is a fugitive on the run, using a series of false identities, trying to escape the clutches of the one rat bastard she didn't kill, who has somehow compromised the new identity that the U.S. Marshals WitSec program established for her. Within the first two chapters of Choke Hold, Angel runs into an ex-boyfriend who starred in porn movies under the name of "Thick Vic" Ventura, sees her current inamorata of convenience, a "firearms enthusiast" who owns the diner in Yuma, Arizona that she currently works at, get killed, sees Vic get fatally injured shortly after reuniting with his 18-year-old son, Cody, at said diner, and has Vic extract a promise from her before he dies to watch out for Cody, who turns out to be an MMA fighter hoping to enter a reality TV tournament in Las Vegas. Given that the "firearms enthusiast" was her middleman in her attempt to secure a fake passport so that she could flee the country and the Croatian goons who are out for revenge following the events in Money Shot, this is a complication that Angel does not exactly welcome.
While Choke Hold starts out at a breakneck pace, it soon idles down into a long stretch of doldrums, although it manages to pick up speed in its last third. If anything, the ending of Choke Hold is even more balls-to-the-wall than that of Money Shot; while I can just imagine, barely, a U.S. movie adaptation of Money Shot, there's no way in hell that any Hollywood studio would touch Choke Hold with a barge pole: the ending is too bleak, and the incidents that fill the book are too sordid and squicky for a Hollywood long past the bad-boy swagger that ran from 1969's Midnight Cowboy to 1980's Cruising. It would take a European director to tackle Choke Hold without significantly diluting it; maybe Gaspar Noé or Nicholas Winding Refn.
Choke Hold suffers from more editorial errors than Money Shot did, possibly due to the kerfuffle of the Hard Case Crime line switching publishers: a Bonneville is referred to as a Buick instead of a Pontiac in Chapter 3 ("I'm sure there were seatbelts somewhere in that old Buick..."); the word "nauseous" is continuously used to indicate that Angel feels nauseated (unfortunately, "nauseous" appears to be well on the way to have the same meaning as feeling nauseated one's own self, rather than its original meaning of causing others to feel nauseated, at least in American English); a bullet is described, in Chapter 5, as looking "like a tiny hardon" instead of "like a tiny hard-on"; Lalo Malloy, from Money Shot, is referred to here as "an old friend," when he decidedly wasn't (he'd only been working for Angel's talent agency for a couple of months before she was obliged to call on him for help; they parted as something both more and less than friends); and there are several incorrect compound words used instead of hyphenated words, such as, in Chapter 12, "largebreasted instead of "large-breasted," "bigbreasted" instead of "big-breasted," and "passedout" instead of "passed-out."
But by far the biggest editorial and authorial mistake of Choke Hold is the soft-soaping of the conclusion of its predecessor, Money Shot; quite frankly, I remain incredulous that Angel didn't "[go] down for multiple murder," even if she did "testify against a bunch of scumbags who were importing underage Eastern Bloc girls for sex" (Chapter 14). Angel is an interesting and fun character, and I can well understand the temptation to revisit her that the author and publisher faced; but whatever shred of believability that Money Shot managed to retain after its nearly Grand Guignol finale is thrown out the window by this single incredible, though necessary, precondition to set up Choke Hold. It would've been better had Choke Hold been set even longer after the conclusion of Money Shot, and had Angel actually served some time for her actions in Money Shot, which included at least two instances of cold-blooded murder.
A final word of advice to the prospective reader of Choke Hold: as with Money Shot, Angel's (at this point) former profession and still-current proclivities are apt to put some readers off of her, as she is sex-positive, and therefore unapologetic for having been a porn actress and head of a talent agency representing porn actresses, or for "letting [her] pussy drive," to cite a line from the penultimate paragraph of Chapter 11. It's a sad commentary on the perceived "acceptable" roles for women in American society that what would pass with a yawn in a male character is a matter of some controversy in a female character.
*Cross-posted to LibraryThing.