The Max (Hard Case Crime (Mass Market Paperback))
Starred Review. Bruen and Starr's third tag-team free-for-all seems engineered to be a pleasure of the guiltiest kind, like No Country for Old Men as directed by Mel Brooks. Max Fisher, legend in his own mind, is finally where he truly belongs: prison. Will his backside withstand the unwelcome attention of the Crips, the Aryan Brotherhood, and his hulking cell mate Rufus? Does bullshit float? For a time, yes, and Max swaggers like Don Rickles cast as Travis Bickle. Far away, Max's ex, Angela Petrakos, is engaged in bloody deeds with the slimy roué Sebastian (a dead ringer for Lee Child), which will land her in the caged heat of a lesbian prison; well, it is prison on the Isle of Lesbos. Meanwhile, aspiring true-crime writer Paula Segal agonizes over her lust for Laura Lippman, but would go to the altar--and even the conjugal trailer--with the repulsive Max in her ruthless hunt for fame. Bruen and Starr's dirty rotten scoundrels and natural born killers do some very bad things in this sleazy grind house, the depraved and daft descendant of Jim Thompson's Pop. 1280 (1964), Joel Rose's Kill Kill, Faster Faster (1997), John Ridley's Everyone Smokes in Hell (1999), and in prose liberally peppered with noir in-jokes, literary references and epigraphs, and pop-culture tags. Are we going to have to separate you boys? Let's hope not. -- David Wright Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved --From Booklist