I'm going to Bouchercon in Minneapolis with rachelmanija and scioscribe in September! This is a mystery con, and as I have done very little reading of current mystery/thriller in the last decade or two (I definitely read it, in fact I love it, but it's considerably more based around "Ooh, that looks good" than trying to keep up with what's current in the genre), the three of us are doing a sort of informal "book club" of books by the convention's guests - see guests of honor here and all attending authors here.

The first two:

Blacktop Wasteland by S.A. Cosby - This had been on my radar to read for a while, so I'm glad this was finally the kick that got me to read it! This is a really excellent, noir-flavored heist novel set in a small town in the South. Retired getaway driver Beauregard "Bug" Montage gets pulled back in for one last job, and we all know how that goes. But the book is a lot more than a heist novel, although it's a good one. It's also a vivid, literary-flavored snapshot of a particular place and lifestyle - working poor in the small-town South - with dialogue and characters as sharp as Elmore Leonard's best, and a general sense of humanity and empathy with its characters throughout the book that makes even the worst of them compelling and most of them are somewhere on a shades-of-gray sympathy spectrum. The book has spectacular action sequences (seriously, this would make a fantastic movie; please take my money) and a series of escalating twists that sometimes made me gasp out loud. I can see why it's gotten all the buzz that it's gotten. It's very dark and a lot of people die, but it never feels bleak; it's engaging, vivid, and darkly funny enough to keep it moving along briskly.

Money Shot by Christa Faust - Also on my general to-read list because of Rachel's review here from a few years ago. This is a dark, bloody, classic-style noir set in the L.A. porn industry. Aging porn actress Angel Dare wakes up in the trunk of a car after someone tries to kill her - and things only get worse from there. The world that she carefully built around herself with the proceeds from her porn career is collapsing like a house of cards, she can't trust anyone, and all she can do is struggle her way from moment to moment, constantly on the run, trying to unravel the mystery of who's trying to kill her and why before the next betrayal turns out to be her last. She's an extremely engaging and scrappy heroine, with no more fighting skills than any ordinary person would have, driven by determination, raw will to live, and a willingness to tap into increasingly dark parts of herself to survive as her world goes to pieces around her.

These two books made an excellent paired set, because they are spectacularly different in almost every way except the broad strokes of the noir genre, but they are also both incredibly vivid portraits of a place, a time, and a subculture, and both are very well structured and fast-paced with a high body count. Would definitely pick up more books by either of these authors.

Next up in our mini book club: Winter Counts by David Heska Wanbli Weiden, a noirish thriller set on a South Dakota rez.