Terrific Novel

Juice is a terrific book and features the humor Campbell showed us in his Jimmy Flannery series, but here his humor has a harder, nastier, more biting edge. Juice is a novel about the gamblers, goniffs, juicemen, loansharks, and other denizens of the Hollywood jungle.

Going back and forth between the banter of a few cynical police officers, the loanshark and his muscle, and the sad string of losers who get in hock to this monster Puffy Pachoulo and end up broken in body and spirit, and desperate.

It is filled with terrific characters like Hey Hey Billy Ray, a cabdriver, wanna-be actor, whose got the disease real bad and by disease I mean the gambling bug. And he's got it so bad he'll hit up his wife and aging mother for their last times and put it all on a nag to win - never just to place or show. Of course, Billy Ray is in hock to the juiceman but can't stop gambling.

The lawyer Nadeau is in hock because of his cash flow issues that he has to maintain his lifestyle and to maintain his drop-dead gorgeous wife Helene, who has her own cash flow problems with her nose candy habit.

Puffy is a great character and his two muscle men are great foils, especially Sam's Man, who carts his dog Sam everywhere. Thus, the name.

Even the officers are colorful including Panama Heath, so named because of his hat and his partner Monk.

What makes this book is the great sense of humor in it, the great cynical lines that just flow off the pages, and just full out great storytelling. ( )