The Max

“Gonna have yer sweet white ass later.”

That’s the first line of the book! And it’s spoken to Max, who begins the story where he ended the last book - in jail. And that’s the greeting he receives from “his towering black cellmate, Rufus.” Nice beginning, huh?

This is an entertaining, raunchy read, with reprehensible characters doing whatever they want to. They are all terrible, and motivated my selfish greed, and somehow, they made me keep turning the pages! I didn't like the ending, but the journey was a hoot!

I thoroughly enjoyed all three novels of the Bust trilogy, Bust, Slide,and the Max. These are three hysterically funny tongue-in-cheek crime novels. That they are the product of a collaboration between two authors is even more amazing. The trilogy begins with high powered executive Max asking his hot secretary, the one he was having an affair with, if she knew a hitman he could pay to off his wife. What follows is a tragic comedy that blows up in Max's face. The Slide continues the story but with Max becoming the funniest hip hop middle aged drug dealer in Manhattan and Angela ( the secretary) hooking up with a serial killer in Dublin and returning to finish it out with Max. In the Max, Max is now in maximum security in Attica and show more figuring out how to save his butt while being caught between several prison gangs. Angela, the nastiest femme fatale of modern times, is in Greece, but has to flee to escape a murder rap, ending up in prison herself.
The book is lightning fast reading and is just plain crazy. show less

The Max is another offering from Hard Case Crime written by Ken Bruen and Jason Starr, two award winning novelists in the crime fiction genre. The titular character is a man by the name of Max Fisher. He is a short, fat, middle aged man with delusions of grandeur. In the previous novel, Max and his mistress, a woman named Angela, knocked off his wife using a former IRA hired killer. Max then set up shop as a drug dealer—a horribly deluded, inept drug dealer, but a drug dealer nonetheless. He was arrested and convicted for his deeds and sent to Attica. Angela, for her part, fled to Greece where she laid low by partying, boozing, and sexing it up with locals and other vacationers.

In the story Angela runs into a spot of trouble (killing show more a man who raped her) in Greece, so she hot-foots it back to the States. Max, through sheer dumb luck, becomes a big shot in the joint (through the spread of the erroneous rumor that he once cut off a man's most prized possession). The prisoners stage a riot, and during that time, Max and his cell mate make an escape. Angela, back in the states by this time, aids them. However, they run into trouble when she is tracked down by the cousin of the man she killed and an English grifter who looks amazingly similar to British author Lee Child. The story ends with every single character dying except for Max and the Lee Child look alike.

The style of the story is simply amazing. The tone is completely tongue-in-cheek, totally satiric. All of the characters are deluded with their own self-importance, and the authors convey their attitudes with precise and amusing effect. It’s most definitely dark humor, but it’s still hilarious. The authors aren’t especially spectacular in their plot-crafting abilities or even their diction, but the tone they have down pat for sure.

The book was a good read, but honestly, it probably isn’t for most people. The characters are just too amoral to appeal to the casual readers. It’s not like it wasn’t a good read, though. You just have to be in the right mindset when you read it—that, and go into it without expecting too much. show less

The story begins with high powered executive Max asking his sexy secretary, the one he was having an affair with, if she knew a hitman he could pay to off his wife. What follows is a tragic comedy that blows up in Max's face. The Slide continues the story but with Max becoming the funniest hip hop middle aged drug dealer in Manhattan and Angela ( the secretary) hooking up with a serial killer in Dublin and returning to finish it out with Max. In the Max, Max is now in maximum security in Attica and figuring out how to save his butt while being caught between several prison gangs. Angela, the nastiest femme fatale of modern times, is in Greece, but has to flee to escape a murder rap, ending up in prison herself. The book is lightning show more fast reading and is just plain crazy. show less

I hadn't read any novels about these two characters before. There is a lot of good action, and lots of the dialog is interesting, particularly Max who in prison pretends (not very convincingly to me, but is to the other inmates) to be a hard case, a murderer etc. But I didn't find the humor, with all the in-jokes about other mystery novels, very engaging or for the most part even funny. I gave it a 3, mostly for the cover art.

Has all the ingredients of something I'd like, but it in the end if feels like more a collection of in jokes than a real story. Not a lot of fun.