The Max Review (Ken Bruen, Jason Starr)

I was waiting for it and it finally happened: I read a bad book by Ken Bruen! Though to be fair to old Ken, he co-wrote this one with Jason Starr, a writer whose work I’ve encountered before (and which also coincidentally has Max in the title: Wolverine MAX, Vol 1: Permanent Rage) and was thoroughly bored by. So I’m putting the sub-par quality of The Max squarely on Starr’s involvement.

Like Bruen’s Jack Taylor series, I’m reading the Max Fisher/Angela Petrakos series out of order - The Max is the third book in the four-book series - but it’s not hard to pick up what’s going on. Basically, Max and Angela have a history and are apart for most of this book because Max is going to Attica Prison while she’s fannying about in Greece.

That’s also the problem: nothing much is going on. Nearly all of Max’s chapters are about him carrying on in prison, worrying about getting raped, and escaping from run-ins in the most contrived fashion, while Angela’s cast in the role of sexploitive character a la the pulp novels of yesteryear that Hard Case Crime (a publisher that has yet to put out anything good) apes. Bruen/Starr toss in the occasional killing to keep the reader awake as most of the time you’re gonna be drifting off with all the bupkis going on.

The tone of the novel and characters are a lot sillier than in Bruen’s usual stories. Think Tom Sharpe or Carl Hiaasen, assuming those names mean anything to you, in terms of campy humour. Max, Sebastian (a British con man) and Paula Segal (a hack writer desperate for attention) are all bumbling idiots careening from one unlikely predicament to another in slapstick fashion.

The antics get tiresome after a fashion but they’re occasionally amusing and not terribly done either. Thankfully Bruen seems to be more in control when it comes to the actual writing because the prose is easy to read and flows well, like they normally do in his novels. But the story of The Max was too slight and the novel overall was much too easy to put down. I do recommend Ken Bruen’s work but I’d steer clear of his collabs with Jason “One” Starr.