NOT SO SERIOUS: LOU BERNEY'S DOUBLE BARREL BLUFF

Double Barrel Bluff is Lou Berney's return to his now former mob driver Shade Bouchon. Old lovers and enemies pull him to an exotic locale in an entertaining adventure, It feels like a contest of who is having more fun, the reader or writer.

We catch Shade living a quiet life, married to former nemesis Gina and ironically working as a driving instructor for foreign students. That life gets disrupted when Dikram Ghazarian, an Armenian thug who vowed to kill him appears at his doorstep. Luckily, he is not here for vengeance, but for help. Lexy Ilandryan, Dikram's boss and Shade's ex-lover, has been kidnapped in Cambodia.

The kidnappers are a professor and some hired goons who know just enough or not enough to be dangerous. Negotiations gets muddied, guns get pulled and fired. Along with Dikram and Gina, who provide a lot of personal tension, Shade has to team up with CIA contact Ouch and an old hippie to save Lexi and survive without starting a gang war.

Lou Berney's last three books were more somber affairs, thoroughly grounded in reality. In Double Barreled Bluff, it feels like he has been cut loose. He expresses a sense of fun, plunging into the genre tropes and putting his own take on them. The characters pop with fun dialogue that is pulp tough guy fused with comic observervational of the crazy situations Shade and crew move through. It creates a style with a lot of humor and and hard boiled bravado that avoids slipping into parody, even the self aware kind. The story moves and escalates with both tension and a sense of adventure.

Double Barrel Bluff is pure genre enjoyment. It takes us along as it's pace accelerates as we hold on and guess with turn it will take. Lou Berney is having a blast with another trip with Shade Bouchon behind the wheel.