If you’re in the market for sex, violence and sleaze, look no further than Hard Case Crime.  Aside from boasting work from such luminaries as Mickey Spillane, Max Allan Collins, Lawrence Block and Ken Bruen, HCC’s attention to detail is impeccable.  Their covers combine great artwork with bawdy, neo-pulp imagery, the fonts hark back to the glory days of hard-boiled crime, in fact, even the type of paper used by the printers is taken into consideration, allowing the reader to experience the feel of a classic pulp paperback.  And of course, there is the subject matter.  There is a bloodline that can be traced from Hard Case Crime right back to Black Mask, the old stomping ground of Hammett, Chandler et al.  Derided by literary snobs, hard-boiled fiction finds the respect it deserves at Hard Case Crime;  its most venerable traditions are reverentially reinvented.

Choke Hold is their most recent case in point.  It features the return of Angel Dare, the porn star vigilante introduced in Money Shot, and follows her across the Arizona desert and down to Mexico, as she battles to deliver a young MMA fighter to Vegas to participate in a reality TV show.  
From the jump, Choke Hold is high-octane stuff, a heady brew of bullets, coke, rippling muscles, illicit sex, and marauding psychopaths.  In a subversion of the classic male/female crime fiction roles, Angel takes the lead, taking a pair of MMA brutes under her wing, chaperoning them through a world they are ill-equipped for, despite their brawn.

Indeed, subversion is at the very heart of Choke Hold.  Angel is ruled by her own genitalia as much as any male lead is by his.  She enjoys a dominant role over the two male characters, Hank and Cody.  Hank, a fighter pounded to the point of brain damage, is a romantic and a southern (US) gentleman; he is the opposite number of the demure, subservient female character of old.  Conversely, Cody is well-endowed, sexually overactive and arrogant, the mirror image of the shameless female fantasy figure that endures today.  Given the ideal forum for it, the male form is lusted over enthusiastically.  Indeed, Choke Hold takes a punky, post-feminist delight in grabbing a fistful of gender identity, slicing it up with a painted fingernail and throwing it back in the reader’s face.  For all this energetic overturning of sexual politics though, Faust allows for at several moments of genuine sensitivity, breathing some humanity into Angel and into the book in general.

Despite her admittedly kick-ass position as a gun-toting ex-porn actress, it is that humanity which makes Angel Dare such a fascinating lead.  Worn down by her time spent on the run in Witness Protection, dismayed by her distance from the life she loved, and emotionally crippled (not least by the curtain-raising death of her former boyfriend Thick Vic), she is a hardboiled heroine par excellence.

Choke Hold, then, is a punchy, single-sitting blast of adrenaline.  It is ribald, pacy and uncompromising, and shouldn’t be missed by hard-boiled fans anywhere.

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