Bust

The Barnes & Noble ReviewThe mean streets of New York City meet the brutality of Irish gangland in Ken Bruen and Jason Starr's Bust, the first collaboration ever between these two crime fiction icons. As cold-hearted as it is darkly comedic, this noir mystery has it all: illicit sex, blackmail, double-crossing, and a virtual cornucopia of unsuspecting murder victims. Max Fisher, aging CEO of NetWorld, is not a happy man. But if he can somehow figure out a way to get rid of his nagging wife, he'll be able to carry on with his wildly self-indulgent, Viagra-fueled existence of drunken business meetings, excursions to seedy strip joints, and, most important, his ongoing affair with his executive assistant -- an Irish-American bombshell named Angela. Fisher hires a hit man, a former IRA thug nicknamed Popeye, to kill the "redundant" wife; but what the balding chief executive doesn't realize is that Popeye is secretly Angela's boyfriend -- and the murder they're planning is another one altogether. Hard Case Crime Editor Charles Ardai describes Bust: "In anyone else's hands (except maybe the late Charles Willeford's), I'm not sure this very dark black comedy would've come off -- there is not one likable character in the entire book (well, maybe one, but he doesn't last long) and the selfishness and viciousness with which the assorted heels and sociopaths pursue their catastrophic schemes at each other's expense is breathtaking." Who says sleazy crime fiction can't be fun? Bust is an absolute gem of a novel -- a must-read. Paul Goat Allen