MONEY SHOT - Christa Faust

From the back cover:

They thought she'd be easy. They thought wrong.

It all began with the phone call asking former porn star Angel Dare to do one more movie. Before she knew it, she'd been shot and left for dead in the turnk of a car. But Angel is a survivor. And that means she'll get to the bottom of what's been done to her even if she has to leave a trail of bodies along the way....

I feel like I should put on some chili red lipstick and shake out a cigarette before I start this review. I left the chili red lipstick at home and I don't smoke, so I'll do the best I can.

MONEY SHOT is a no holds barred, don't get attached to anyone kind of book. Under normal description, this could be a cozy mystery...the main character is not a detective and finds herself having to investigate the hell that her life has become through no fault of her own. Except cozy mystery writers tend to not utilize the porn industry as a backdrop and the main character is rarely (read NEVER) a porn star who now runs her own agency for porn starlets.

Angel Dare, porn star back in the day and still recognized for her work in X rated films, retired from in front of the camera and is now behind the scenes with her high class adult modeling agency Daring Angels.

Angel is having one of those days of feeling her years and finds herself saying yes to a request to get in front of the camera just one more time. She ends up hit in the face and stuffed in the trunk of a car, left for dead.

She wants to find out who did this to her and why and get her life back if she can.

It's grimy, sordid, definitely not a feel good book to read and I read it in practically one sitting. I couldn't sleep nights until at least some aspect of the awfulness that was happening to Angel was rectified. I read until someone got what was coming to them.

The voice over in my head for this book was Linda Fiorentino, all smoky.

Five gritty avenging beans......