Review by Booklist Review
Lange describes a sunset with wind that is "hot and pushy. Black clouds limned with moonglow roll in." Later, "a persistent orange glow keeps the stars at bay." This eloquence stands in stark contrast to the story detailing the state of the counterculture in Southern California, a sad world of idlers, stoners, and parasites, pessimism and depression. Joe Hustle is in this world but not totally of it. An ex-con and Gulf War vet, he has a job bartending in Los Angeles and helpfully shares recipes. (A Tootsie Roll? Kahlua and orange juice.) He's also the only one they can call to replace a thermocouple on a water heater. His meeting with wealthy live wire Emily seems like a step up, but initially it precipitates a hard tumble down and into danger until they decide to head out on a drive across the U.S. Nature's grandeur does have healing power. And the uproar in the last quarter of this hard-knocks, atmospheric tale offers hope, however tentative and half-hidden.
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Lange's excellent latest (after Rovers) revolves around 40-year-old Joe "Hustle" Howard, an ex-Marine and ex-con wrestling with past traumas as he bounces between jobs and temporary living situations in L.A. While painting a house one afternoon, Joe meets Emily, a charming woman exiled from her wealthy family and fighting for custody of her daughter. Their whirlwind romance gives him hope for a more stable future, but then one of his friends asks Joe to safeguard his truck and the heroin and gun inside it. Joe reluctantly agrees, which quickly puts him at odds with a violent drug dealer, and ultimately causes him to lose both his job and his home. With his life once again in shambles, Joe and Emily leave L.A. and head to Texas on a road trip to see Emily's daughter. But what first looks like a clean getaway might only cause Joe more trouble in the long run. It may be the best novel yet from the always reliable Lange: a harrowing and occasionally hilarious character study in resilience. This is a home run. Agent: Henry Dunow, Dunow, Carlson & Lerner Literary. (June)
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Review by Library Journal Review
After a successful left turn into the supernatural in the 2021 vampire novel Rovers, Lange returns with a memorably gritty neo-noir. Joe Hustle lives up to his moniker, surviving on odd jobs and the generosity of a rogues' gallery of characters in his orbit. Tending bar, minding the register at a convenience store, driving drunk people around at all hours: anything he can take to eke out another day on the seedy side of Los Angeles. Everything changes when he's hired on a painting job up in the Hollywood Hills and meets Emily, the owner's wild-child sister. Joe and Emily begin a tenuous but intense relationship, providing Joe with a stability and a sense of purpose he hasn't had in years, one that is threatened when he finds himself homeless, he becomes the target of a local drug dealer, and Emily begs him to take a cross-country road trip to see her estranged daughter. The chapters with action alternate with transcripts of Joe's conversation with an unidentified person to flesh out his backstory. VERDICT Lange is so adept at drawing his two main characters that readers won't mind the relative lack of plot twists; the real suspense comes from seeing Joe Hustle skate by one more time.--Michael Pucci
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Review by Kirkus Book Review
An Iraq veteran who served time for grand theft auto finds escape from a life of pickup jobs in Los Angeles with a younger woman with perplexing mood swings. Joe Hustle, as the heavily tattooed protagonist is nicknamed, has done a pretty fair job of dealing with a wretched upbringing. His father, who fatally shot his own brother while 6-year-old Joe waited in the car, was stabbed to death before his sentencing. And Joe's mother has never had anything but verbal abuse for him. But at 41, he's in a rut that no amount of drinking and dope smoking can lift him out of. Along comes Emily, whom he meets while working on her sister's house. A would-be filmmaker who carts around a copy of Anna Karenina (watch for her own encounter with a train), she shows him the kind of affection he's never known. But between his anger management problems and her apparent bipolar disorder, their romance keeps hitting the rails during a cross-country drive to Texas through Las Vegas and the Grand Canyon to see her 8-year-old daughter. Where they are headed as a couple is anyone's guess: "It seems like every time he comes up with a plan to get back on track lately, a bomb goes off." Lange is best known for cuttingly funny novels about killers, dealers, and con men like This Wicked World (2009). Here, though not without an assortment of bad deaths, he returns to the romantic mode of The Smack (2017), with a beautifully toned-down story about a pair of mismatched characters who win our sympathy not in spite of their doing and saying dumb things, but because they just can't help it. It's a real pleasure to read. The latest novel by a first-rate storyteller refusing to be pigeonholed. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
