Tag Archives: Lou Berney

Fiction, Reviews

‘Double Barrel Bluff,’ by Lou Berney

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Why not? he thought.

Understanding, even as he thought it, that asking yourself, Why not? was usually the beginning of a bad decision, the first domino tipping over.

I like Lou Berney’s Shake Bouchon novels very much. The main problem with them is that he brings them out pretty slowly. So it was a pleasure when I saw that there was a new one available – Double Barrel Bluff. It’s an excellent, offbeat, dark comedy thriller.

Charles “Shake” Bouchon, our hero, is a former wheel man for the Armenian mob in Las Vegas. But he’s now married to Gina, a former pickpocket, and they’ve gone straight. Straight to Bloomington, Indiana, where they have square jobs and live a square life. Which they love.

Until one morning Shake finds himself accosted by an old enemy, Dikran Ghazarian, an Armenian thug the size and strength of an ox, with only a little more brains. To Shake’s astonishment, Dikran – who has often promised to murder him – does not want that today. He explains (after catching Shake) that Lexy Ilandryan, the woman leader of the Armenian mob, has disappeared while on vacation in Cambodia. He needs Shake to go to Cambodia with him and find her. Shake feels some obligation to Lexy, and so they fly there, to hunt for Lexy among the slums and ancient temples.

The dark humor of Double Barrel Bluff rises in large part from Shake’s attempts to keep a rein on Dikran, whose idea of investigating is to punch people and break things. Meanwhile we also follow the team of kidnappers, also a “smart” one and a dumb one, oddly parallel to Shake and Dikran. Author Berney excels at characterization – the good guys and bad guys constantly surprise us, but never pass plausibility.

Cautions for language and extreme situations. And some psychic/Buddhist nonsense. But Double Barrel Bluff was a very exciting and amusing light thriller. I enjoyed it a lot.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Dark Ride,’ by Lou Berney

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My city is a midsized metropolitan area in the middle of the middle of the United States. It’s flat and sprawling and a lot like a lot of other places, with no distinguishing characteristics geographic or otherwise. If my city was a suspect in a crime, the eyewitnesses would have a tough time describing it. You could probably say the same thing about me.

Think of The Big Lebowski. But imagine it, not as a dark parody, but as a full-on, dead-serious 21st Century Noir novel. That’s more or less the ambience of Lou Berney’s Dark Ride.

I’ve reviewed a couple Lou Berney novels before, and I liked them very much. I haven’t read one in a while now because the publisher prices them high, but I got a deal on Dark Ride. And it’s very, very good.

Hardy “Hardly” Reed is a classic slacker. Long, shaggy hair, tee-shirts, board shorts, flip-flops. He holds a minimum wage job as a “frightener” at a horror-themed amusement park, and the rest of his time is spent playing video games and getting stoned with his slacker friends.

Until one particular day, when he’s at the Department of Motor Vehicles, getting an extension on a parking ticket. He notices a pair of small children sitting on a bench outside of an office. He’s puzzled by how quiet they are. They don’t laugh, they don’t play, they don’t talk. They just sit staring, like commuters on a bus. He approaches them to say hello, and then notices small, perfectly circular marks on their bodies. Someone has burned these children with cigarettes.

Something comes over Hardly then that he’s never experienced before. He discovers he cares. He tries to get help from a DMV worker, then from Child Protective Services. Nobody seems greatly concerned. The bureaucracy is snowed under with work. Hardly decides that if nobody else will help, he will. He can’t afford to hire a private detective, so he’ll learn to investigate on his own. Usually in his life, he’s given up on any task that seemed difficult or dangerous. But he can’t let go of this one.

Will Hardly, just this once in his life, be good enough?

I read Dark Ride almost in one sitting. It proved to be a grimmer story than I expected, but that only pulled me in. This is an excellent and original thriller. I recommend it. Cautions for language, sex, and drug use.

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.