A COWBOY TOUGH LADY:CHRISTA FAUST'S THE GET OFF

There is no book I waited for with more anticipation for than Christ Faust's The Get Off. The queen of pulp told me she was going to cap her trilogy with hard boiled heroin, ex porn star Angel Dare, by using the backdrop of my favorite sport, rodeo over ten years ago. The wait is finally over.

It opens some months after the heart wrenching conclusion of the second book, Choke Hold, with Angel exacting her patiently planned vengeance on her gangster nemesis Vakusin. Two things happen in her plans execution, she accidently kills a police officer in a chaotic gun battle and she discovers she is pregnant. Through an underground contact, she arranges to meet up with an off the grid couple near the Canadian border who help get abused women out of the country and one of them is a midwife.

The meat of the story begins when Angel is placed with her transporter Wash, a rodeo bullfighter who also competes in freestyle competition. If none of that jargon makes sense to you, the story gives you enough information for you to understand and be entertained in the passages where Wash and other bullfighters go to work. Angel gets only a few easy miles down the rodeo road until a fateful gas station stop kicks off a beating, more shootouts, mistaken identity, a fire, a chase through the woods that leads to something more dramatic, and a crime that could only happen in rodeo.

One thing I associate with Faust, particularly in the Angel Dare series, is her attraction to professions that are also subcultures, Whether in Money Shot's adult entertainment industry or Choke Hold's mixed martial arts. Angel and those she deals with are in professions that don't leave them them when they clock out. They define them and the perception of them. And like the people in those two books, The Get Off's bullfighters put their bodies on the line for the amusement of others. While she depicts the work, the author's interest lies in the personalities and lifestyles of those involved. She hangs with the athletes, buckle bunnies (rodeo groupies), and the families. We feel the dust, pain, and endurance of highway travel. As always Faust captures it all its noble, sexy, and sleazy glory. If I have any complaint, it's that she captures the world so well and in an entertaining fashion, I wish i got to spend more time seeing it through Angel's eyes.

The other thing I associate with Christa is how she infuses her work with an unabashed love for hard boiled fiction. Her work doesn't simply take on the pulp style, it makes it the life blood of the story. Here, she works it at her most virtuoso for an emotional impact . The genre allows to be both blunt and operatic with Angel struggling to give birth to life while she faces death. It all accumulates to a last line that would fall apart in lesser hands but, but is a gut punch in hers.

The Get Off is purported to be the last Angel Dare book. If that's so her swan song is a symphony of passion and gunfire where one clings to life when death may be the only way out. Christa Faust doesn't play around with her pulp.