"Joe Hustle 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."—Publishers Weekly (starred 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 . . . The uproar in the last quarter of this hard-knocks, atmospheric tale offers hope, however tentative and half-hidden."—Don Crinklaw, Booklist
"The latest novel by a first-rate storyteller refusing to be pigeonholed . . . Lange is best known for cuttingly funny novels about killers, dealers, and con men . . . 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."—Kirkus Reviews (starred)
“Joe Hustle is downright brilliant—delightfully dark, deeply poetic, and a little bit heartbreaking. Richard Lange’s novel is a masterclass noir filled with the twisted souls and grisly pleasures of down-and-out Los Angeles. I goddamned loved it.”—Ivy Pochoda, author of Sing Her Down
“Lange is Shakespeare with a shank. His writing comes straight from noir’s obsidian heart, and it cuts to the bone. This novel is a dark love song, a long poem about being so damn low you can walk under a snake. Each line Lange writes is a firecracker, and Joe Hustle is a whole lotta dynamite.”—Gabino Iglesias, author of The Devil Takes You Home
“Joe Hustle takes us into a rich, vividly sleazy underworld in the company of a protagonist that we grow to care about deeply. Richard Lange is one of our very best practitioners of noir, and this book is yet another gem.” —Dan Chaon, author of Sleepwalk
“Lean and mean. Hard-boiled and hard-hitting. Gritty and noir-y and full of hangdog heart. That’s what this piping hot serving of Angeleno crime fiction is. Richard Lange’s Joe Hustle crawls under your skin and stays there till the last page.” —Gregg Hurwitz, author of Lone Wolf and the Orphan X novels
"Lean and gritty, thoughtful and nuanced, Joe Hustle delivers all the goods, right down to my favorite final page in years. It's a book with the muscle to keep you up all night and the heart to haunt you the next day. I'll read anything Richard Lange writes."—Michael Koryta, author of An Honest Man
"As he spends his life cycling through odd jobs and making questionable life choices, veteran Joe Hustle’s main credo is ‘don’t die.’ A wonderfully bittersweet and darkly humorous tale, Richard Lange’s Joe Hustle is part love story and part recorded memoir of a man whose main goal is to just make it through life alive. Hard to put down and easy to get lost in."—David Swinson, author of The Second Girl and Sweet Thing
Praise for Richard Lange's Rovers:
"Want a book that will scare the daylights out of you this weekend? Rovers, by Richard Lange. The best vampire novel I've read since Let the Right One In."—Stephen King (on Twitter)
"Rovers is a lean, mean pulp masterpiece of American horror. I was blown away. Richard Lange is the real deal."—Joe Hill, author of Locke & Key and Nos4a2
“A swift, delicious novel that’s firing on all cylinders . . . The book has a lot going on, with as many settings as characters, propelled by the jet fuel of resentments, assassinations-for-hire, mistakes, and love affairs . . . There are a few amazing fights too . . . Lange balances it all perfectly.”—Carolyn Kellogg, Los Angeles Times
"Outstanding supernatural noir . . . Evocative prose illuminates the neon-lit world of small-town 1970s America. Lange succeeds brilliantly at combining the vampire and noir traditions."—Publishers Weekly (starred review)
“Lange has done it again! Another tour de force! Another gripping page-turner! Shifting points-of-view, beautiful language, drama, action, fantasy, pathos—Rovers has it all! And it makes me feel greedy like a vampire (or a rover): I want and need another Richard Lange book right away! Well, I have to be patient and rational: I have his other books to reread and this one, too, which is an utter triumph and delight.”—Jonathan Ames, author of A Man Named Doll and creator of HBO’s Bored to Death
05/01/2024
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
