Bust
Ken Bruen & Jason Starr, 2006

Max Fisher, the owner and CEO of an IT network support company in Manhattan, hires a small-time, fresh-off-the-boat Irish thug who calls himself ‘Popeye’ to off his wife – mainly so he can marry his blonde and surgically enhanced mistress and executive assistant, Angela Petrakos. Angela, though, is also shacked up with Popeye (she met him in Belfast when she was getting back to her Irish – on her mother’s side – roots) and has plans of her own once Max’s wife is out of the picture, because she has little interest in a long-term relationship with the balding, overweight and generally obnoxious Max. However, Popeye ends up not only killing Max's wife but also his niece, and things really start to go south once the cops begin investigating, because they immediately suspect that Max is behind the whole thing. Meanwhile, Bobby Rosa, a wheelchair-bound former armed robber and Iraqi war vet with a penchant for photography, gets involved when he snaps a few shots of Max and Angela in a compromising position while working a scam in a hotel and realizes there’s a chance for a quick payday.
There’s really no one to root for in this book, as pretty much every character is a truly awful human being, although some more than others. What keeps you reading is the fact that they are, in fact, pretty believable – especially with regard to the many stupid decisions most of them make, which makes the story darkly humorous at times.

A Star Above It and Other Stories by Chad Oliver

Chad Oliver is one of those names that I recognized, but, to my knowledge, I'd never read any of his work.  He was generally better know as an SF fan than as an SF author.  He published a handful of novels from the 50s through (mostly) the 60s.  And was a fairly prolific writer of short stories in the 50s.  He was very active in early fandom and was a professor of anthropology.  That science informed his writing and most of his SF can be classified as anthropological science fiction.  He didn't garner a lot of award noms (though, to be fair, he was most active before there were many awards).  And his stories weren't really anthologized that much.  Thus the fact that I don't think I'd ever read any of his work before I started reading this book.  But again, I was familiar with is name just through general osmosis, I guess. 

But thank goodness for NESFA Press and their great big collections.  And, while I haven't paid as much attention lately, it appears that NESFA is still publishing...though it does look like they've slowed down significantly.  This was the first of three volumes of work by Oliver published by NESFA Press.  The first two have a large cross-section of his short stories, while the third has three of his six SF novels.  I read this over a fairly long period of time reading one story between each novel that I read.  

As with any work of the sort, the stories will vary in quality.  And given that most of these are at least sixty years old, they're going to show some age.  All of Oliver's protagonists are terribly wasp-y males.  They're almost all middle-aged anthropologists who smoke pipes and enjoy fishing (a LOT of self-insertion there).  But the stories are also generally well thought out and are a pretty interesting contrast to the more hard-science oriented stories of Oliver's contemporaries.  His look at SF from an anthropological stand-point is certainly an interesting change of pace.  I do think that this would get pretty same-y if one tried to sit down and read it straight through.  But parceled out at a story every five or so days it worked quite well.  

Recommended for those who like some Golden Age SF that hasn't been anthologized to death. 

I haven't either.  I thought maybe one of his stories was in the Asimov edited "Before the Golden Age" but apparently I was mistaken.  I know he did some writing for Timely in the 40s.  

He did, at least according to Wiki, including some Namor and Human Torch.   Some day I'll finish my to read pile and then actually start looking for some other stuff... some day....

Slide
Ken Bruen & Jason Starr, 2007

A follow-up to Bust (reviewed above - just scroll up a bit), set about a year after the events recounted there, in which we see more of the misadventures of the reprehensible and comically stupid Max Fisher and Angela Petrakos. The book is mostly divided down into two story lines, one following Max and the other Angela, in alternating chapters. So Max comes up with the brilliant idea of dealing crack to wealthy a-holes in NY, an epiphany that came to him in some dead-end town in Alabama – where he woke up in a motel with no idea how or why he got there. For a time he does well, but he is, naturally, getting high off of his own supply so that he gets into serious trouble with both the cops and the apparently Columbia-connected cartel down South that’s supplying him. Angela, meanwhile, ran off to Ireland with a bunch of Max’s money, where she is hitting the bars and nightclubs in Dublin in the hopes of using her, erm, assets to find a rich sugar-daddy and live the easy life of a moocher. Instead, she gets tangled up with a bona-fide serial killer who calls himself ‘Slide’ and who’s obsessed with American pop culture (although Angela is too dim to realize that he’s a complete psychopath until it’s way too late). After Slide’s homicidal tendencies put them in jeopardy in Dublin, they high-tail it to New York, and eventually the two story-lines converge and more mayhem ensues as the body count grows. Far more than the preceding book, this one dials up the almost slapstick black humor and outrageous violence to 11. Another aspect of the writing style that I failed to mention before, which also really comes to the fore in this book, is that the third person narration is modified to fit the personality and inner monologue of whichever character is the focus of a given chapter. So, say, the chapters dealing with Max are filled with hip-hop gansta lingo (or rather, what an aging, drug-addled clueless white guy thinks is hip-hop lingo). I realize this is intended for humorous effect, but that doesn’t make it less cringey and grating.

After basically devouring the entire Old Man's War series in less than a month some years ago, the only other Scalzi book I've read is Fuzzy Nation (which I reviewed here somewhere upthread). I really need to read more of his stuff.