Gunshot Straight

The opening of Gutshot Straight worried me. An ex-con just released from prison picks up a job driving a car from LA to Vegas, only to find that there's a sexy young lady in the trunk of his car. This worried me because I am always worried by novels that steal their plot from The Transporter. Even the combined genius of a Dicken-Joyce-Nabokov hybrid couldn't craft prose capable of competing the action-packed adrenaline rush that is The Transporter.

Fortunately, Gutshot Straight doesn't make the foolhardy decision to rip off The Transporter. Instead it's a story of the aforementioned ex-con and a stripper who team up to try and sell authentic Biblical foreskins, while avoiding the Armenian mob and the violent strip club owner Dick Moby. There's also the requisite mainstream crime fiction addition of awesome, mind-blowing sex, because apparently everyone who reads mainstream crime fiction is a furtive masturbator. Mainstream crime fiction authors really don't give their audience enough credit. There are some readers out there who just want to spend a quiet Saturday night reading about a stripper trying to fence a case full of Philistine foreskins. I don't really need the whole Ross-and-Rachel subplot. although it's probably to be expected, considering the author is a TV/Film writer.

Tacked-on subplots aside, Gutshot Straight is a very enjoyable novel. The denouement, in particular, is magnificent. A Shakespearean in magnitude clash of violence, morality, plot threads, and foreskins. Good stuff, although the resolution to the story doesn't quite match up. In typical Hollywood fashion, the ending mixes trite romance and bad jokes, while leaving an obvious opening for a sequel. Because of Gutshot Straight, Lou Berney is now an author I'm going to add to my radar. And because of the denouement of Gutshot Straight, which, again, was brilliantly awesome, I'm going to hope that with his future works, he can ditch the hackneyed TV pilot nonsense, cast off the shackles of Hollywood screenwriters, and live up to the potential displayed in Gutshot Straight