A fundamentalist Christian TV mogul, an ex-pornstar, an awkwardly oversized Scottish photographer, a cop who doesn’t want the job, and a failed abortion clinic bomber walk into a foreign distribution event for American B-movies in Los Angeles at the tail end of the twentieth century. That setup alone sold me on this one, and it all plays out to hilarious effect. The fact that it’s written by the brilliant Scottish crime fiction/satirist Christopher Brookmyre, pushed it to the top of my to-be-read pile. Seriously, this writer is completely unknown in the US, and that needs to change.

I’m impressed with the depth of character development present here, especially in the antagonist(s). Most crime fiction I’ve read had fairly cookie cutter characters, or comically one dimensional bad guys. But Brookmyre took some of the people I despise the most, and made me empathize with them to some extent. That’s good writing. It’s still abundantly clear where they’ve gone wrong, but you can see why they made/make the decisions that they do, however misguided. In our protagonists, particularly in the retiring pornstar, he’s done a wonderful job of demystifying a profession that is generally demonized. And the writing during the sections dealing with her past, internal conflicts, and struggles are some of the best in the novel.

I tend to read a couple books at a time, usually one novel, and one non-fiction book on some subject that I’m interested in. I unintentionally started reading this one around the same time as We Did Porn, by Zak Smith, not knowing that the two books would inform each other splendidly while reading them together. Both dealt with the pornography industry, Los Angeles culture, fundamentalist Christians, and the republican party at length. I’ve heard others say that this book came off as too preachy for their tastes, and I can understand that sentiment, as the story was probably a bit too heavy on the wish-fulfillment for a general audience, but it satisfied my inner liberal, socialist, atheist, feminist, godless heathen heart to no end.