All Things Violent by Nikki Dolson

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Originally Nikki Dolson’s All Things Violent had a release date of May by 280 Steps but then the publisher suddenly shut down in March. Luckily, the book and writer managed to rise from the ashes and found a home in the burgeoning Fahrenheit Press. Who knows how many books have been lost by the 280 Steps debacle but it is nice to see several books like Dolson’s All Things Violent, Eric Beetner’s Rumrunners and Leadfoot, and Mark Rapacz’ Boondoggle getting published.

Dolson’s All Things Violent is the story of Laura, a twenty-something-year-old woman who is just starting her career as a hired assassin. She is also in love with her boss, Simon, a career-minded narcissist running a private investigation firm in Las Vegas. Training Laura is another one of Simon’s specialized assassins, Frank, whose training methods and criticisms are harsh and, at times, life-saving. But it’s the distinct point of view of a young black woman in an overwhelmingly white man’s game that keeps the reader’s interest engaged. In the opening scene of All Things Violent, the perfume of their target is what engages Laura, not something a male character might latch on to.

Evelyn Bright was gone. Only the faint scent of vanilla remained to prove she’d been there at all. I smelled it before when I searched her house. The scent clung to her clothes, lingering in the master bedroom and bathroom, fainter in the other rooms. I smelled vanilla again when Frank and I caught up with her husband and his mistress. In the car they were driving, it was slowly overwhelmed by the mistress’s own flowery scent— a mixture of hairspray and cheap perfume.

All Things Violent is a good character study of how a young woman deals with the savagery of her chosen cut-throat trade. Told through the first person of Laura, I found All Things Violent enjoyable except for the one jarring chapter towards the end of the book which switches into the third-person omnipresent point-of-view. I realize there was some information that the reader needed to know but there probably was a less distracting way to do so. (But then again this might be an inside baseball complaint.) Dolson reveals to us Laura’s history and motivation during her various assignments. Throughout All Things Violent, Dolson shows she has the writing chops and some great story-telling talent. Not only did I enjoy All Things Violent, I am looking forward to reading her next book.

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Incident Report No. 1

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What follows is a stab at the week in review of small press crime fiction. I have written these reviews for the past month seeing if I could one stay interested and two if I could find the time. Over the last four weeks, this had several different iterations — none of which you will see — until I settled on something along these lines. This post covers the week of July 17-23.

If you haven’t had the chance to listen to Tom Pitts and Jordan Harper’s conversation about writing, you need to. They are authors of American Static and She Rides Shotgun respectively. The podcast, an episode of Pitt’s Skid Row Chatter, is a short master class on writing. When they started talking about point of view, I’m not ashamed to say, I got a semi. Speaking of writing tips, Chris Rhatigan quietly posted two wonderful articles: In Defense of the Small Book and Five Writing Mistakes You Can Fix Right Now. As co-publisher of All Due Respect Books and a freelance editor, Rhatigan gives away some valuable advice for free. You should get on this post haste.

Through the Ant Farm by Robert Leeland Taylor was released by ABC Group Documentation and since this is one of my favorite publishers, this book immediately jumps up to the top of my TBR. Another great small press, Broken River Books, released The Snake Handler by Cody Goodfellow and J David Osborne.  A new anthology called Noir at the Salad Bar: Culinary Tales With A Bit is out featuring short stories about “gastronomic mysteries”. The fifth in Malcolm Hollingdrake’s DCI Bennet series, Dying Art (Bloodhound Books), is out. Also new from Bloodhound Books is the third installment of the DI Hamilton series by Tara Lyons, Deadly Friendship. New in the UK is Ausma Zehanat Khan’s The Unquiet Dead (No Exit Press), it is available in the US from Minotaur Books. Though not news to anyone, Michael Connelly has started a new series with a female cop, Renée Ballard. The first book is The Late Show. Richard Lange and Tetsuya Honda have released new books as well.

Tony Knighton, the author of the new book Three Hours Past Midnight (Crime Wave Press), has a short story on Trigger Warning called Dolly. Trigger Warning is new to me and the first thing that struck me was the incredible images that accompanied each short story. Admittedly, I haven’t had a chance to read anything past Knighton’s story but do take a look at Trigger Warning, the images by John Skewes alone are worth it. Three other stories I’m recommending are Angel Luis Colón’s Counting Ashes, Tony Tremblay’s The Scum Bar, and Joshua Chaplinsky’s Letters to the Purple Satin Killer.

Last week I reviewed Rob Hart’s The Woman From Prague (Polis Books) and Iain Ryan’s The Student (Echo Press). Over at Black Guys Do Read, Richard has been on a tear of reading some decent comic books: Peepland, Saga, and Sex Criminals. His review of Winslow’s The Force was spot on. A couple of other reviews you might want to read are Scott Alderberg’s excellent take on The Student and Gabino Iglesias’s review of She Rides Shotgun. Another book that has been getting a lot of good play on the internet is Tom Leins’ self-published Skull Meat.

Kellye Garrett, author of the forthcoming Hollywood Homicide (Midnight Ink), posts on The Thrill Begins about going from one’s Writer Hat to the Author Hat. As Garrett writes about how one moves from “flailing around in the middle of an ocean full of books screaming ‘Notice me! I’m over here! Isn’t my cover pretty?'” to actually accomplishing some good promotional work for one’s book. E.A. Aymar, writer and managing editor of The Thrill Begins, has a post about the painful waiting after submission.

Waiting is hell for writers. You’ve spent so long working on a book, finally written something pretty and polished and publishable. At any moment (seriously, any moment) you could receive word that you’re going to become a published author. You check your e-mail after meetings. Rush through voice mails. Worry about how often you’re bugging your agent. Every day you wake up excited, have that excitement wane through the day, and go to sleep disappointed. After a while, that nightly disappointment seeps into your days.

Two other posts that are worth mentioning is Gabino Iglesias’s LitHub column and his latest entry, Why Do So Many Indie Presses Fail, which is a sad but important read. Iglesias interviews several small press publishers about their take on the high failure rate of indie presses. Oh, and Scott Alderberg again, this time with an interview with Iain Ryan at Do Some Damage. Andrew Nette updates your Australian crime calendar with a Noir at the Bar and an interview with Meghan Abbot.

I post this knowing the incredibly long time a book takes to get a book published, but I still found the similarities striking.I came across a new book by Heather Burnside called Born Bad (Aria). As the blurb goes it is a “gritty Manchester crime trilogy. When your enemies get close, family loyalty is all you can trust.” This book immediately reminded me of Marnie Richards’ Born Bad (Avon) released a few months ago. It’s described as “gritty and gripping” by Kimberly Chambers. The description of Richards’ book starts out as, “A powerful, darkly comic novel set in the criminal underworld of Manchester from bestselling author Marnie Riches. The battle is on …” Indeed the battle is on.

The Robbery by Jim Cummings is a short crime film that if you haven’t seen it is well worth your time.

I hope you enjoyed this attempt at a week in review. By the time you read this, I’ll already be working on Incident Report No. 2.

The Student by Iain Ryan

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Nate is a college student and pot dealer living in a trailer park outside of Gatton, Queensland in 1994. Winter has left Gatton and September’s spring has dried up Nate’s pot supply causing him several problems in Iain Ryan’s The Student (Echo Press). First and foremost, Nate pays his rent with weed, so no weed no trailer. And then his friend and connection Jesse has disappeared. Eviction looms and it’s only Wednesday.

A few more pages into The Student, two bikers from the Doomriders visit Nate looking for Jesse and/or $45,000. Dennis and Hatch scare the shit out of Nate while explaining to him that he is now responsible for the money and they’ll be back to collect in a few days. It’s still only Wednesday.

Told in the first person, The Student takes place over a frantic week as Nate searches for Jesse and the money while all the time dodging customers who are unrelenting in their want of weed and the two bikers intent on getting their pound of flesh or money — they don’t seem to care. At times, Ryan has Nate slip into a stream-of-consciousness style that only increases the tension. Nate’s journey introduces us to a cast of strange characters, weird in that way that twenty-something-year-olds are as they try to discover what kind of adults they’ll be, but calling Ryan’s The Student a coming of age novel is like saying The Silence of the Lambs is about a dressmaker.

The Student makes this the fourth book I’ve read of Iain Ryan’s since November 2016. In crime fiction terms, The Student is a vanished person thriller, but that would be like categorizing Ryan’s Tunnel Island series as police procedurals. Hint, they’re not. Ryan infuses a deep dose of noir into his books, twisting the standard genres into something deviant and dark. Like Ryan’s other books, The Student is a great read filled with plenty of weirdness, violence, drugs, sex, and other sins.

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The Woman From Prague by Rob Hart

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Rob Hart’s The Woman From Prague (Polis Books) opens with Ash McKenna living in Prague, an escape from the States to help deal with his demons — self-inflicted or otherwise thrown his way. Working as a jack-of-all trades for a temporary apartment rental company, McKenna cleans, fixes and manages the units spread-out throughout Prague. This set-up gives McKenna the time to explore the city as well as examine what in his life that has brought him to this place.

A few pages into the book, McKenna’s world comes to a crashing halt when three men to visit and “offer” him a job. With a viable threat against his mother’s life, McKenna reluctantly has to take the job — the stealing of some information from a banker who turns out to be the woman from Prague.

The job ends up not being that simple — obviously — and, in short order, everything goes haywire for McKenna. What should have been a smash and grab turns into McKenna fleeing for his life while still trying to protect his mother from 4,000 miles away. And now The Woman From Prague begins in earnest as a man on the run story.

Hart has created something deeper than the usual thriller superhero. As McKenna tells it, “I’ve been in a lot of fights. Some I won, some I lost, but I always walked away. This might be the one where I don’t.” McKenna’s reactions to the situations that surround him are more fight or flight. He has no arsenal of talents that he can use to overpower or outsmart his opponents, rather he relies on his New York moxie and charm, though the New Yorker in him gets him punched more often than not. What McKenna lacks in spy smarts and lethal brawn is what makes Hart’s The Woman From Prague succeed as a page-turning thriller. When done well, as in this book, the reader always roots for the everyman hero punching above his weight.

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Criminal Economics by Eric Beetner

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Reading an Eric Beetner book is lots of fun in that they are original, dark, fun, and there are plenty of them to choose from. Beetner’s Criminal Economics (Down & Out Books), which is a reissue of sorts, tells the story of two bank robbers who escape their prison transport during the height of a hurricane hitting the shores. Slick, a big guy with an ugly mug, hates his partner, Bo, who ratted Slick out less than 24 hours after their successful bank robbery. The prisoners go their separate ways and Beetner’s Criminal Economics follows their journeys over the next 48 hours.

Their haul from the bank robbery was never recovered, so both Bo and Slick chase after the more than half-a-million dollars that is being watched over by Slick’s girlfriend, Emma. But bad news for the guys as Emma has decided to take the money and run. Also on the tail of Slick and Bo is Detective MacKaye, a good-looking cop hunting down fugitives and a bit of a horn dog.

Having read only three of Eric Beetner’s twenty-some-odd crime novels and even with this tiny sample, I can see a humor beneath the darkness. Beetner doesn’t write jokes, his humor lies with within the situation and his character’s subsequent actions. In the opening chapter of Rumrunners (Down & Out Books), an old man drinks a cup of coffee at a donut shop where everything is wrong from the donuts to the guy behind the counter. The first chapter of Rumrunners ends with the old man breaking the finger of the donut man and walking out with his cup of coffee. The fact that this reviewer finds this funny should tell the reader much.

A hardboiled novel, Beetner’s Criminal Economics seeps with blood and laughs. In one chapter, Slick holds up a diner and things get dark as shit real fast, but Beetner makes the reader chuckle before all hell breaks loose.

The walk back down the two-lane highway was so hurricane-wet Slick may as well have been swimming. He saw what he wanted. A diner with nothing else around it and only a few cars in the parking lot stood getting as soaked as he was. Red neon rimmed the top of the metal and glass building. Deep ruts in the gravel of the parking lot collected muddy water deep enough for a midget to take a bath.

Slick picked up his pace despite gaining a few pounds of mud on his boots as he neared the entrance. Shotgun in hand, still empty but he’d never tell, he kicked through the glass door, rattling dusty venetian blinds and cracking the glass as he did.

“Hands up motherfuckers! Now, which one’s got the best car?”

Originally published in a limited run of 100 back in 2013, Criminal Economics has finally come out for everyone to enjoy its craziness. As Slick and Bo search for their money and Emma tries to leave town with it, Beetner takes on this weird and bloody journey where no one is safe. After I finished this madhouse of a novel, I posted the following tweet. I could try and fail to throw more superlatives on Beetner’s Criminal Economics, but saying “It’s Beetnerific!” is all the praise it needs.

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