Having read Victor Gischler’s Vampire a Go-Go, I thought I new what to expect from his Go-Go Girls of the Apocalypse.  I was mistaken.  Or rather Go-Go Girls exceeded my every expectation.  It was fun, witty, ballsy, crude, intense and entertaining.

Set nine years after the end of the world as we know it, Mortimer - whom the story revolves around - comes out of hiding and decides to make contact with what’s left of the outside world.  His first experiences with people, after his nine years hermitage, are violent and frightening.  Taken captive by a man that he refers to as the Beast and his child sex slave, Mortimer is robbed, beaten, humiliated and tortured.  When suddenly he is rescued by a cowboy, a man with six-shooters, the ten gallon hat and everything.  Buffalo Bill, as he calls himself, agrees to help Mortimer make it to his old home town so he can look for his estranged wife.  Once there Bill convinces Mortimer to visit the local Joey Armageddon’s Sassy A-Go-Go where the beer is cold and the women are hot, which ends up being a life altering experience for Mortimer.  It turns out, that in this new post-apocalyptic world Joey Armageddon’s are the closest thing to civilization.  It’s not just a titty bar, but a jumping off point for all kinds of commerce and industry, as well as a stabilizing influence and a rallying point for defense and militia.  Mortimer trades away some of his supplies which he had brought down the mountain with him - mainly booze - and finds himself suddenly a very wealthy man.  He is given a platinum membership for Joey Armageddon’s which is valid at all franchise locations, a tool which will open many doors for Mortimer and lead to unexpected dangers.

Bill and Mortimer set out together to track down Mortimer’s wife, who it appears was sold as a Go-Go girl out further east.  In the process they come across all sorts of troubles, from Red-Stripes - highly organized and ruthless thugs - to con men, hillbillies and cannibals.  They get into and out of much trouble and many tight situations, all the while Mortimer is not only struggling to survive, but also to come to terms with this violent and strange new world.  And just when it seems that they have reached their goal and Mortimer may be re-united with his ex-wife - who he’s not sure that he wants to see anymore - they are thrown into a greater tumult and given a new mission with a fun new companion, Sheila.

This story is crazy action packed.  It was intense and funny, and filled with all kind of surprises.  The imagery is straight out of a movie; which, although I don’t usually enjoy in a book, in this case makes it even more exciting and fun.  For example, after liberating the bad guy’s harem Mortimer is surprised and pleased by what they do next:

She climbed behind the wheel and started the truck, backed it off the curb.  Lisa came in from the street and jumped in the back.

The redhead - Brandi - hopped in the back too.

Brandi had found a pair of combat boots among the dead, stood tall and strong and straight in her green panties and bra, the butt of her AK-47 assault rifle resting against a cocked hip.  The wind tugged at her red hair.  A long streak of somebody else’s blood down one leg.  Her head was up, eyes bright.  She looked like she owned the world.

There she goes, Mortimer thought.  The icon for a new age.

I really enjoyed Go-Go Girls of the Apocolypse.  It was just so much fun to read and has given me a new appreciation for Gischler.  The things which I most enjoyed about this book were the surprises.  Since it was so movie-like in it’s plot and imagery I often found myself thinking that I knew what was going to come next, but each time I was completely surprised.  I eventually started anticipating these new surprises; each time I found myself speculating about what was going to be said or what was going to happen I became even more excited because I new that it was going to be awesome and unpredictable and completely unlike anything I would guess.

In the highly competitive world of online reviewing, filled with intrigue and sexiness (don’t question it, just trust me on this), it is important to remain fresh, exciting, and relevant. Since I am neither fresh, exciting, nor relevant, but more on the funky, staid, and obscure side of things, I present to you a review of an old movie. Well, not classically old. New old. One of the many thrillers to fall through the asscrack of the early 2000s.

Shiver, or Eskalofrio in its native tongue, is the premier outing of little known Spanish director Isidro Ortiz. He released a couple pseudo thrillers around 2000, but good luck digging them up. This film, release in 2008, is his first outing as a distributed filmmaker.

Shiver focuses on Santi, a young man possessed of a rare skin condition that makes him hypersensitive to sunlight. Also, for the super scientific reason that “it makes him more vampiric and that’ll build tension”, the condition makes him grow fangs. In order to preserve his health, he and his mother move to a secluded mountain village that, due to its deep valley location, only sees direct sunlight for part of the day. Shortly after arriving in town, Santi finds himself accused of several murders coincidentally accompanying said arrival. Not an unreasonable supposition to make, considering your local shepherd just showed up exsanguinated after a night stroll in the woods. It seems perfectly understandable to blame the pale kid with fangs who lives in a gloomy house on the edge of the wood. Without spoiling anything, shenanigans ensue.

It’s difficult to review this film without giving anything away, so for those of you who really don’t want to have it spoiled, I will first give a quick opinion of the quality of the film and leave my criticism of the plot for a spoiler tag.

The film isn’t bad. I don’t know what it is about Spanish filmmakers, but they have an uncanny knack for creating a sense of dread and tension without resorting to a splatterfest. Either the children’s stories in Spain are disturbing as hell or they just have some natural predilection for being terrified all the time. As far as the creepy factor goes, this film stands about on par with The Orphanage or Pan’s Labyrinth. If you don’t come out of this film with a slight sense of the wiggins, then you are jaded enough that you’re better off watching Phantasm or Hellraiser to get your kicks.

The plot moves pretty smoothly through the first part of the film and the characters are as well written as they are well rounded. Seeing young Santi marginalized by his peers in town and country alike gives you a bit of sympathy for him. Particularly since he doesn’t engage in needless moping like the “Emopires” of popular supernaturalia. This element of estrangement doesn’t dominate the story, though by and large the writers seem to remember that the movie is fundamentally a thriller, keeping the tension on a simmer the entire time and bringing it to a boil several times to great effect.

All these nice things having been said, the latter fourth of the film really screws the pooch. The monster of the film has the potential to be really horrifying and is, I confess, refreshingly original. Though I’ll be damned if they don’t take the best idea for a villain and smear it around in a haphazard fashion, much like a retarded ape hurling around a bucket of shit. When a movie reveals the big bad, IF it reveals the big bad (the unseen threat is often more terrifying), it ought to not only make sense and agree with the facts that we have already established about the monster, but it should also increase your fear of it. When the monster in The Thing reveals itself, it taps into our primal fears, as opposed to tapping into our suspension of disbelief and igniting a paroxysm of laughter. Well, The Thing this ain’t, and it shows most especially in the last 15 minutes of the film. If the effects manager had, at some point, talked to the writers before he set his design in stone, the disparity between monster and effects might have come off as something awesome instead of comical. While the film deserves a seven or eight, the revelation of the actual monster puts it firmly at:

This new launch trailer is, in my opinion, the best Rockstar has released thus far. I suppose it makes sense to save the best for last, as they say. And I imagine this will be the last video released, save for the half hour long (!) trailer that’s premiering this Saturday.

I’m so excited, I kind of feel like I’m gonna throw up.

I must admit that I was hesitant to read this.  I mean, I love Pride and Prejudice, I’ve long had a soft spot in my literary heart for Austen and the Regency romance, and Pride and Prejudice has to be my favorite Austen novel.  And man do I ever love me some zombies.  But somehow the combination seemed like a little too much of a gimmick.  And I just wasn’t sure if anyone could do justice to Pride and Prejudice while inserting zombies into the mix.

Seth Grahame-Smith did an excellent job of fitting zombies into the lives of the Bennett sisters.  He skillfully worked a whole background of a longstanding war against the undead into the story.  And a lot of the humor of the story, for me, came from that backdrop which he had created.  I  found enjoyment in the small additions such as Sussex becoming Section Six East in transformed fortress of London.  According to Grahame-Smith it was acceptable for the nobility and gentry to send their sons and daughters to study under Eastern masters in order to learn the “deadly arts” to use in defense of his majesty’s realm.  I was a little taken aback by the disciplined, katana wielding, violent Bennett girls.   It was hard for me to imagine my familiar little heroine Elizabeth Bennett cutting down hordes of zombies while worrying over her younger sisters’ improprieties and her own unhappy marriage prospects.  Yet there was a consistency in the storytelling that quickly won me over, and left me wondering how else this familiar story was going to be transformed.  One of my favorite changes had to be from Elizabeth’s best friend having been stricken with the plague and her quickly deteriorating state contrasted against the day to day business of upper class tea parties and walks through the estate grounds.  And the fact that her friend was three quarters dead and no one but Elizabeth seemed to notice!  Pretty hilarious.

One complaint that I have heard about this novel is that as fun as zombies are it’s still Pride and Prejudice.  And I would have to say that this is a fair assessment.  Grahame-Smith leaves most of Austen’s story intact.  In fact he leaves most of the story in her own words, inserting his own story elements.  This is actually where my biggest criticism comes from.  Some of Grahame-Smiths additions were just to liven up the story a bit.  He threw in luridly hinted at infidelities and lots of balls and sex jokes clothed in Victorian language and indirectness.  It came across like a trashy romance novel.  I was really really tired of the references to the attraction being to “his most English of parts” and young women blushing as they cradled his (musket) balls gently in their hands.

Overall I enjoyed this story and think that Grahame-Smith did an excellent job in his work.  Sadly the one element which I most hoped for, zombie hordes chasing frightened gentry and devouring them in bloody carnage, was missing.  As for anyone who may be interested in Pride and Prejudice and Zombies I would just say that it is still Pride and Prejudice.  I don’t think Grahame-Smith edited anything out of Austen’s novel, instead inserting his own additions, so this book is loooong.  In some ways that’s good, because all of the elements which I most enjoyed from Austen are still present, but I think that it would have been more enjoyable as a zombie novel had it been shorter.  It’s hard to sustain zombies as a credible threat for 61 chapters in which business goes on as usual in the round of balls and tea parties and visiting country estates.  All that said it was a well crafted story and quite enjoyable to read.  And there is just something so deliciously exciting about the irreverence of putting zombies in the middle of a Jane Austin novel!

Fleet of Worlds co-authored by Larry Niven and Edward M. Lerner is one of those novels which I sat down fully expecting to enjoy.  I found it to be, in a lot of ways, quite disappointing.  While the story was interesting and the characters were for the most part well done, there was just too much else wrong with it, too much that didn’t fit or tried too hard to fit.

Fleet of Worlds is set in Larry Niven’s Known Space universe.  Also in this universe is Ringworld, and it’s sequels, probably his most well known an awarded novel.  This is the universe of the Amalgamated Regional Militia (ARM), Jinxians, Bandersnatchi, Louis Wu, the Man-Kzin wars, Beowulf Schaeffer, Piersen’s Puppeteers, and… I can go on and on.  Anyway the point being, that this is a well established universe.

It takes place mainly in and around the Fleet of Worlds, the Puppeteer homeworld and concerns humans and Pierson’s Puppeteers - an alien race of sentient, technologically superior, perpetual cowards.  There are in fact two groups of humans in this story, the ones living in and around Earth and it’s colonies - referred to as wild humans by the Puppeteers - and the Colonists, a group of humans descended from a failed colony ship living on one of the Puppeteers food worlds.  The Colonists are virtual slaves to the Puppeteers and are kept completely ignorant of their true past and of the rest of humanity living on Earth and it’s colonies.  The Colonists serve the Puppeteers, whom they call Citizens, and are handed only the technology and information that the Citizens feel it is safe to let them have.  A small group of Colonists are being groomed and trained to act as forward scouts for the Fleet of Worlds, and it is in their training and work for this that these humans begin to question the story they have been told about their history and begin to question their previous blind devotion to the Citizens.  Also in this story are two Puppeteers; Nike an overly ambitious being who is striving for political power for both himself and his Experimentalist political party and Nessus a half crazed - due to the fact that he is willing to risk his life in such frightening ways as daring to fly in spacecraft and to meet face to face with humans (I did say they are perpetual cowards as a race) - Scout and agent willing to take whatever risks to win Nike’s love.  Throughout the story of the humans struggle for knowledge and eventually independence we get to see Nike’s schemes and plots which will eventually lead him to become the Hindmost (supreme political leader of the Puppeteers) and Nessus’s complete infatuation and pursuing of Nike, at almost any cost, a lot of which involves working with and manipulating the humans.

I had two main problems with Fleet of Worlds.  First, it just didn’t feel like a Larry Niven novel.  There was something so indefinable and yet so essential missing.  One thing which I can point to is his characters.  They were very interesting, but somehow they just didn’t read like Larry Niven characters.  One of the things I have always enjoyed about his characters is how intuitive they are.  Well, the ones that survive at least.  And a big part of that enjoyment is in seeing these characters connect the dots right in front of my eyes and I still don’t get it.  Yes, you read that right, I like not knowing what is going on.  Well for a moment at least, it creates wonderful suspense to know that all the groundwork has been laid out and that it will all make sense in a moment when the characters explain themselves, but that for the time being I can only guess and speculate.  The main human characters in Fleet of Worlds, Kristen, Omar and Eric are all wonderfully intuitive, but they take the time to explain - right in the middle of the action and the crisis - what it is they have figured out.  It drove me crazy.

My other main complaint about Fleet of Worlds was that it tried to do too much.  There was too much it tried to explain and connect.  And in a lot of ways all those connections and explanations seemed to invalidate a lot of what had come before.  It’s always difficult when an author goes back and fills in the backstory.  But I think there was just too much done here.  In the interest of not summarizing the entire plot (and at the risk of sounding like a complete geek) I will be both brief and general in my descriptions.  The authors connected stories which stood on their own - I felt that the Puppeteer involvement in Forward station, from a Beowulf Schaeffer story, really detracted and distracted from the fun short story that it had been.  It seemed to me that the Gwo’th were a re-imagining of the Jokoti from the Man-Kzin wars - either they are newly emerging as an industrialized race or they are a former galactic power now subjugated, you can’t have it both ways.  The Puppeteer’s meddling with Earth’s Fertility Board was another such example, the Fertility Board scandal being a bit of back story in several short stories.  The authors spent a lot of time establishing that it wouldn’t be easy - and at the same time making it seem so half-assed - it wouldn’t be easy but all that was done was throwing obscene amounts of money at human agents and then occasionally monitoring them.  I was bothered also by the entire treatment of Nessus - a character who shows up in several known space short stories, and who is one of the main characters in Ringworld.   I found the character to be less and less sympathetic and less and less competent the longer the story went on and the more fill-in-the-story work that he was made to do.  The romance - if you could call it that - between Nessus and Nike seemed boring and cumbersome and made me care very little for two previously fascinating characters.

I have enjoyed some of Larry Niven’s previous collaborations - for example The Mote in God’s Eye with Jerry Pournelle was one of the most original stories I have ever read - but they tend to lack the excitement of his solo work.  So when I picked up this novel I was both a teeny tiny bit leery of it as a collaborative work, and quite overly excited to have more Known Space to consume.  After reading this my conclusion is that Mr. Niven should leave his Known Space alone, it’s beautiful as it is and he keeps fucking it up.  I was disappointed by his last installment of the Ringworld stories, Ringworld’s Children, and I was disappointed with and angered by Fleet of Worlds.   There are two more books following this and I must say that even being as much of a completist as I am - I will not touch them.

The story of the Colonists was quite interesting, but not at the expense of all that had come before.

Fun and light, I found Victor Gischler’s Vampire a Go-Go to be entertaining. It was very reminiscent of Christopher Moore to me, in the sort of lightly vulgar and irreverent style of supernatural comedic horror, with a bit of sex thrown in. And the title is pretty awesome. The story mainly centers around Allen, a mostly unremarkable young grad-student who is sort of rushed along through events for the greater part of the story until he finally has enough and grows a pair. Yeah, he’s that kind of protagonist. But it’s ok, because there’s enough comedy thrown in - and not all of it at Allen’s expense.

Allen finds himself facing his upcoming summer abroad in Prague with dread - he’s to be the research assistant for a disliked professor. Allen goes to a party at the professor’s home where he meets up with his friend Penny - who obviously has a thing for him which he equally obviously can’t see because he’s blinded by his need to seek out soul sucking bitches. Oh yah and then he meets the vampire. The party is actually unimportant except for that it’s chalk full of foreshadowing.

Once in Prague, Allen sort of mopes around for a bit, oversees the professor’s packages that are supposed to arrive - one of which to the reader obviously contains a coffin - and then goes to a local bar. Where he unexpectedly meets up with a priest he knows and they sit down for some drinks. Pretty soon Allen is lured by an attractive young woman named Amy out into the night - a woman who had slipped him a cryptic message warning him against the priest - and is hit over the head and shoved into the trunk of a car. At the end of Allen’s ride in the trunk he is taken to meet Basil, a man who promises to explain it all. After some initial apologies and explanations the scene proceeds as follows:

‘This doesn’t have anything to do with me,’ Allen said.

‘I’m afraid it very soon might,’ Basil said. ‘For you see, your very own Professor Evergreen has come to Prague, not to write a chapter on Kafka as he’d have you believe, but rather to plunder the secret dungeons of Prague Castle in search of the philosopher’s stone.’

Allen went slightly pale, the surprise plain on his face.

‘I can understand that this might be a lot for you to digest,’ Basil said.

‘It’s not that.’ Allen swallowed hard. ‘It’s just that there’s a priest at the window with a machine gun.’

And there was. Lots of carnage. Allen gets pulled out of there by pretty young Amy and they find themselves on the run.

For me most of the book read like a cross between Christopher Moore and The Da Vinci Code. The story is mostly told by a ghost, who breaks up the action with some really odd anecdotes that overall felt like it was better suited to the Twilight Zone than to story at hand. There was of course the vampire, who disappointingly didn’t figure as prominently in the story as I expected, what with the title and all. But upon further consideration this may be for the best, the vampire was rather compulsion, sex and lust and not much else, and I am rather tired of hyper sexualized vampires as I’ve stated before. There was also a fun lycanthrope and quite a bit of sorcery - good witches covens and evil warlocks - as well as some fun and unexpected zombies.

The story is pretty fun, but for me the writing got in the way much more than it entertained. It attempted to be clever and witty with lots of thrown in one liners that were very hit or miss. Very often I just found it annoying. Or pointlessly vulgar. I was also bothered by the narrator and the seeming stylistic inconsistencies that became most apparent through the narrator’s anecdotes and breaks in the narrative. In some ways it really reads almost like an extended screenplay. It the kind of story that could easily make a fun little gore and comedy filled horror flick. In no way subtle. Overall I found it enjoyable, the good and entertaining outweighing the annoying. I don’t expect to remember very much of it, or to ever read it again. However, that said, I think I’ll give Gischler’s other hot title a chance, Go-Go Girls of the Apocolyse.

Imagine, as you read this, a four-hundred-twenty pound man, sweating profusely and struggling just to breathe. You now have an adequate image of KFC’s target demographic for their new sandwich: the Double Down!

"Not while I'm eating!"

What the hell’s in it?

Funny you should ask. When I think sandwich, I’m thinking you’re gonna take some assorted meats and/or cheeses and throw it between a couple slices of bread. If you’re human, and not some kind of evil robot that laughs at the puny human digestive tract for its lack of efficiency, you probably consider that a sandwich too. Guess what? You’re fucking wrong!

"Your need to poop will be your downfall."

The Double Down(!) doesn’t need your wimpy bread. KFC looked at every other sandwich on the planet and said “You know what this sandwich needs instead of bread? More fucking meat!” So they replaced any bread content the Double Down(!) may have had with two whole chicken breasts. I can hear you already “that’s not a sandwich, Joe, you’re just stuffing two whole chicken breasts in your mouth,” and any other day you’d be right. But not today, Mary Jane! In order to make it qualify as a real sandwich (according to the rulings set forth by the mysterious International Sandwich Standards Committee), it had to have other stuff in the middle. So, what’d they do? They shoved some more meat in there. Bacon, in fact! And how ’bout some cheese, why not? What kind of cheese? Monterey Jack and Pepper Jack alright with you, Susie? Fuck it, let’s slather some spicy sauce on there and call it a meal!

Meat, meat, and cheese!

You’re really worked up about this. Is it any good?

Is it any good? Is it any good?! It’s meat, and cheese, and more meat! Of course it’s good. And a hearty helping of that addictive substance the Colonel puts in it to make you crave it fort-nightly doesn’t hurt either.

"That's not crazy."

The only way this sandwich could be any better is if they served it swimming in a tub of mashed potatoes and gravy. That, or offer it with the Colonel’s Crispy® recipe. Unfortunately, it’s only offered in grilled and Original® recipe (mashed potatoes and gravy sold separately).

Damn that sounds good. What’s the catch?

The catch is that it’ll probably kill you.

Double Down(!) Nutritional Facts

And, although it’s about as good for you as drinking a tall glass of bacon grease with a salt chaser, it’s still better than just about anything you can get at McDonald’s or Burger King.

Update
The question arose: What would you drink with a meal as decadent as the Double Down(!) that could possibly match it? My friends, the answer is a simple one:

A bacon-mug filled with nacho cheese!

Day One

13 Bullets by David Wellington

Day Two

Vampire a Go-Go by Victor Gischler

Week Three

Fleet of Worlds by Larry Niven and Edward M. Lerner

Month Two

Pride and Prejudice and Zombies by Seth Grahame-Smith

13 Bullets by David Wellington combines the hard-bitten detective teaching his lovely and naïve protégé with a little bit of the supernatural and creates a predictable yet fascinating story. It did one of my favorite things in vampire fiction - it maintained the vampire as monster, pure monster - and still managed to keep a little bit of the sexy. 13 Bullets was fun, violent, and fast paced; all around surprisingly enjoyable.

The two characters whom the story revolves around are Special Deputy Arkeley and State Trooper Laura Caxton. Arkeley is a crusty old police veteran and the only living human to have come into contact with vampires - the only human with experience killing vampires. While Caxton is this lovely yet insecure new Trooper who just happened to stumble across the latest vampire uprising. Arkeley swoops Caxton up and drags her along in his hunt of the vampire brood, all the while keeping her guessing as to whether she is bait, newest protégé, or just convenient eye-witness. There’s not much to be said for their relationship; Laura has daddy issues and insecurity while Arkeley is able to show a human side despite his gruff exterior. The dynamics between the two weren’t that interesting - having seen or read this kind of story countless times Wellington didn’t have anything significant to add. It is to be hoped that the relationship between these two manages to be more interesting, as they feature in at least three more books.

The vampires were wonderful superhuman monsters, blood-thirsty and viscous, physically differing from humans in many respects, one of them being ridiculous strength. The opening chapter - the report filed by Arkeley recounting his first encounter - provides a vivid scene and an introduction of the vampire’s brutality and inhuman-ness.

“Lares spun around on his side without any warning at all, far faster than a human being could move. He got one knee under him and grabbed at the SWAT’s arm to pull himself up. He had no trouble whatsoever getting a grip on all those crosses. The SWAT started to react, bringing his MP5 up, ducking down in a firing crouch. Lares grabbed his helmet in two hands and twisted it right off. The policeman’s head came with it.

For a second the decapitated SWAT stood there in a perfect firing crouch. Blood arced up from his gaping neck like a water fountain. Lares leaned forward and lapped at it, getting blood all over his face and chest. He was mocking us. He was goddamned making fun of us.”

The entire novel is full of these violent and bloody scenes rich in gore and spectacle. In addition to the vampires there are also creatures called half-deads, the gruesome remains of the vampire’s victims reanimated to serve the vampire.

Wellington’s vampires (and half-deads) have their own strengths and weaknesses, and a good deal of the fun is in learning what the rules are. For example vampires can grow old but that has it’s own attendant problems.

“The woman in the wheelchair…was little more than bones wrapped in translucent white skin as thin as tissue paper. There was no hair on her head except for a few spindly eyelashes. The skin had broken and parted from the bones of her skull, in places having worn away altogether, leaving visible shiny patches of bone. She had one plump eyeball, the iris colorless in the blue light. Her ears were long, sharply triangular, and riddled with sores. Her mouth looked broken, somehow, or at least wrong. It was full of shards, translucent jagged bits of bone. Caxton slowly made out that these were teeth. The woman had hundreds of them, and they weren’t broken. They were just sharp. This was what she had read about in Arkeley’s report…a vampire, an old, blood-starved vampire. She’d never seen anything more horrible…”

As bizarrely pathetic and morbid as this creature is, she turns out to be a formidable and ruthless opponent. And in a lot of ways it was this unexpected evil that made the story most interesting. If that pathetic creature could be such a menace what else was in store for the vampire hunters?

All the sexy in the story came from the character of Caxton, she was an insecure lesbian in a man’s world trying to keep herself private. When I first discovered that she was lesbian I was bracing myself for scenes of male fantasy hot lesbian sex - which would have really come across as grotesque or barely justified. Much to my delighted surprise - and I’m sure many other readers dissapointment - there were no fantasy lesbian scenes, just two women who loved each other. I was however annoyed at the psychology behind some of it, but only mildly annoyed and it didn’t come into play until nearly the end so my reading experience wasn’t ruined. I just think that people of all sexual orientations are capable of mourning a loss in their relationship - if you lose your loved one in anyway you should be sad not jumping on the next hot thing that comes your way. But enough said on that.

Overall I enjoyed 13 bullets immensely. This book exceeded many of my expectations. It was violent and gory, intense and in some ways thought provoking. After a few days though my excitement has waned and while my estimation of this story has not changed I find that the characters and story weren’t enough to inspire me to read any other of the four novels in this series.