Alaska Employment Law

If you are old enough to remember pulp fiction — I don’t mean the movie, I mean the drugstore  literature — then the Hard Case Crime series will appeal to you.  These are “hard boiled” books, some of them reprints of old crime novels, some of them newly written, that would make Dashiell Hammett proud, or at least interested.  (If you don’t know Mr. Hammett, hop onto Amazon and buy The Thin Man and The Maltese Falcon first, and then graduate to The Dain Curse and Red Harvest.)

Part of the fun of Hard Case books is — well, they’re lurid in their own way, with delightfully sleazy cover art that mimics those seedy little drugstore paperbacks sold in the first half of the 20^th century.  Yet for the most part (I’ve read about 8 of them), they’re still well written, utterly noir.  I recently found Money Shot, by Christa Faust, a book about an ex-adult film star who ends up in a very bad circumstance, inside the trunk of a car, through no fault of her own.  She finds a hero to help her, but in the end she must be her own hero.  Justice is served, sort of, in Money Shot, but not the way you think it will be served.  Ms. Faust’s view of things is pretty bleak, and pretty surprising at the same time.  The book is rather like an accident that you inappropriately discover.

Like lots of books in the Hard Case Crime series, Money Shot is trashy but sticks in your head, mainly for its romantic brutality.  So, first of all, no complaining:  I said it was a trashy book.  However, if you like modern police procedurals, you might try any of the Hard Case Crime books.  If real pulp fiction makes sense to you, you might want to spend the $6.99 and get a little grubby.