PIMP

A former drug kingpin stumbles on a new designer drug and uses it to fuel his comeback in the fourth entry of the Max Fisher series.

Tending bar at an Irish saloon, Max finds a young dealer who has come up with a drug whose acronym is PIMP. Employing his usual sleazy means, Max takes control of distribution and is soon once more riding high. Meanwhile, Angela, the femme fatale who's dogged him through the series, is in Hollywood, angling to get a film made about her and Max. There’s not so much a plot as there are a series of incidents on which the authors hang various wisecracks, inside jokes, and cutesy little nods to their pals in the crime fiction biz. Their idea of characterization is to have a Jamaican good-time gal end every sentence with “mon” or to have a French hood stand up for a woman’s honor by killing her after she’s been raped by a thug in his employ. The writing is for people who find the celebrity gossip on an average episode of TMZ too restrained. On the opening page, Max's face is compared to “Philip Seymour Hoffman after the autopsy.” Hoffman is later identified as the actor who “got like an Oscar for playing a faggot.” To be offended would be to take the authors’ pathetic bait.

We're told the name PIMP stands for the mixture of peyote, insulin, mescaline, and psychosis. Pulp, Idiocy, Snark, and Scumminess would have been a more truthful acronym.