From New York originally, Christa Faust has worked as a model, a professional dominatrix and as an award-winning writer of original pulp and tie-in fiction. She possesses an unapologetic attitude and an encyclopaedic knowledge of film noir. Her novels featuring Angel Dare are modern noir stories told in an unflinching, often brutal manner, from Angel’s perspective. The femme fatale is given agency, the male fantasy stripped away to reveal the truth beneath, in all its beauty and ugliness. Following Money Shot in 2008 and Choke Hold in 2011, after 14 years away Christa and Angel return with The Get Off.
Set in 2011, not long chronologically after the events of Choke Hold, The Get Off throws us straight in to the action. Ex-porn star Angel has been locked in a kill-or-be-killed dance with the Croatian gangster Vukasin ever since he murdered the people Angel most cared for. Disguised as a nurse, she plans to kill Vukasin when he attends a hospital appointment. The hit might be considered a success were it not for three important factors: Angel has been hurt in the chaos, she had to kill a female police officer to escape, and a chance conversation with a sympathetic nurse has revealed she is pregnant. Safe to say motherhood has never been on Angel’s agenda.
The husband of the deceased Officer Corbin has become a media star and a manhunt for Angel is gathering pace, so she holes up in a hotel waiting for the heat to die down. She earns escape money catering to the pregnancy fetish crowd then heads to Yuma, Arizona, looking for help from an old friend. A plan is agreed. Angel will be driven to northern Washington for an off-the-books late-term abortion, and then over the border to Canada.
Plans, however, have a habit of going wrong. Angel finds herself a fish out of water in the American west of professional rodeos, bullfighters, buckle bunnies and cattle barons. It is a world whose rules she doesn’t understand, full of people she doesn’t know and can’t trust with agendas, rivalries and plots of their own. All the while her pregnancy – The Situation as she refers to it – is becoming more noticeable. Her cover as fleeing an abusive ex becomes more threadbare. Meanwhile, the threat from Mr Corbin draws nearer.
The Angel Dare series is notable for its frank depiction of sex. The novels aren’t especially explicit, and certainly not titillating, but the matter-of-fact characterisation of sex as something transactional is consistent throughout, whether to hitch a ride or avoid arrest. Faust really focuses on Angel as a traumatised individual, the choices that she has made – if they really are choices – and the things that have been done to her affect Angel’s perspective on everything. The prospect of oblivion becomes increasingly attractive to her, even though something inside won’t allow her to give up.
For all the glamorous trappings of the rodeo setting, The Get Off is a very bleak book. So much so that I think it might be hard for readers new to the series to pick this novel up cold, even though in plot terms it could certainly be read as a standalone. I recommend getting in at the ground floor with Money Shot. Happily, both earlier books have recently been republished.
Why not take a look at our review of Real Easy by Marie Rutkoski?
Hard Case Crime/Titan Books
Print/Kindle
£7.99
CFL Rating: 4 Stars
