Tag Archives: Lou Berney

Fiction, Reviews

‘Gutshot Straight,’ by Lou Berney

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Shake wondered how long before they opened a Vegas-themed hotel and casino that was an exact replica of the city around it, including a replica of the Vegas-themed hotel itself, and so on down to microscopic infinity.

Impressed as I was by Lou Berney’s The Long and Faraway Gone, which I reviewed a few inches below, I wondered how much I’d like Gutshot Straight, his first novel, which was advertised as a comic crime story.

I liked it enough to laugh out loud more than once while reading it – in a restaurant – something that hasn’t happened to me in years.

Charles “Shake” Bouchon, the main character of the novels, is just finishing up a prison stretch for Grand Theft auto when we first meet him. He’s an accomplished “wheel man,” a getaway driver. But he’s decided he’s getting too old for that sort of thing. It’s a sucker’s game. He wants to go straight. Open a restaurant, if he can.

But when an old friend, the beautiful head of the Los Angeles Armenian mob, asks him to do an “easy” job for her, he figures what can it hurt? He can use the money. All he has to do is drive a car to a particular address in Las Vegas, and deliver a briefcase to the man who’ll meet him there.

You won’t be surprised to learn that it turns out a lot more complicated than that. Shake finds himself in a situation where he has the choice of looking the other way, or saving a life. He saves the life, and then the fun begins.

The action centers around a bogus religious relic (I won’t spoil the fun by telling you what it is), which is no less precious, thanks to its mere age, for being a fraud (I assumed author Berney had invented it, but apparently it actually exists, or did exist). All kinds of bad people are hunting for it, and they covet it enough to torture and kill to get it.

Doesn’t sound like a comic novel? Well, it’s all in the presentation. Years ago people recommended the author Elmore Leonard to me, based largely on his sharp dialogue. But I never warmed to Leonard. He’s a cold-blooded writer (or so I perceive him). I don’t care about his characters.

Gutshot Straight is kind of like Elmore Leonard by way of P. G. Wodehouse. I don’t mean the inimitable Wodehouse diction, which wouldn’t work here, but the Wodehouse kind of story. Where some dim young man is pressured or blackmailed into kidnapping a pig or stealing a silver cow creamer, and only manages to carry the job through because he’s surrounded by idiots and lunatics, running around like characters in a French farce. The chief female character and love interest in this book is right out of Wodehouse – a spunky, fearless, utterly amoral female dynamo who knocks Shake for a loop. And one character in the second book, Whiplash River (which I’m still enjoying reading), “Harry” the retired Cold War spook, is essentially Uncle Fred with a gun.

And the presentation is in no way cold-blooded. Berney excels at treating characters, even sociopathic ones, in three-dimensional ways.

I never wanted this book to end. The publisher charges too much for it, even in the Kindle edition, but I wouldn’t have missed it.

Cautions for language and violence.

Fiction, Reviews

‘The Long and Faraway Gone,’ by Lou Berney

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The past had power. The past was a riptide. That’s why, if you had a brain in your head, you didn’t go in the water.

Ring the steeple bells! Festoon the festal bunting! Declare a bank holiday! Lars has discovered a new favorite author!

I’d never head of Lou Berney before. I think I downloaded The Long and Faraway Gone because they offered a deal for the Kindle version. But you can now list me among this guy’s faithful fans. I wish he had more published novels to date.

At first glance, The Long and Faraway Gone is simply a superior example of a subgenre that appeals to me (though frequently disappointing), what I might call the “personal cold case” story, where someone investigates a crime that touched them long ago, discovering the ways in which memory (and people, including oneself) mislead and lie.

But author Berney takes a fresh approach from the beginning – this is a two-strand story, concerning two separate murders connected only by general location and date. The two narratives run parallel through the course of the book, only brushing against each other in passing.

One strand centers on Las Vegas private detective Wyatt Rivers. He agrees to do a favor for a friend – fly to Omaha for one day to help a friend who runs a music club, who’s been plagued by acts of vandalism. Only – oh, wait – it’s not Omaha. It’s Oklahoma City. Wyatt, who has already agreed to the favor, is dismayed. Oklahoma City is the one place in the world he doesn’t want to go. Because years back, when he was a teenager and had a different name, he was one of a group of employees herded into the projection room of a small movie theater. The robbers shot them all to death – except for Wyatt. Ever since that night, he’s been living with survivor’s guilt, the memory of the girlfriend who was killed, and the obsessive question – “Why me? Why did they spare my life?”

Julianna Rosales’ life changed that same summer, at the Oklahoma State Fair, when she was only six years old. Her beautiful older sister, Genevieve, had left her alone “for just fifteen minutes” while she went to try to score some cocaine, and vanished from the face of the earth. Since then Julianna has lived without close relationships, or any purpose other than discovering the truth about Genevieve. An old photo posted on Facebook leads her to a string of new clues, and into great danger.

We follow these two wounded people as they turn over the stones of their pasts and learn that memory is fallible, and people are not always what you think they are – for better and for worse.

I enjoyed this novel immensely. The writing was flawless, the dialogue and characterization sharp and textured and layered, the plot resolutions believable. There’s great humanity, and great human compassion, in Lou Berney’s writing.

I think you could even make an argument for a kind of Christian subtext. The self-identified Christians who occasionally show up in the story can be silly, but are generally well-meaning, though the chief Christian character, for some reason, uses the “f” word a lot.

Some rough language, as you’ve already guessed from the paragraph above, and “adult” themes. But on its merits I recommend this book highly. One of the very best I’ve read recently.