ANGEL FACE

A gorgeous high-class prostitute and a cold-blooded killer meet cute.

Angela Tamanaka has spent a lifetime being irresistible. Although her friends call her Angel, an angel she’s not. She’s a professional hired out to fat-cat clients who can afford to splurge for the special eroticism she brings to her calling. Racketeer Ricky Ditto is one such. It’s on entering Ricky’s opulent apartment that Angel initially encounters Leonard Carter. He too has a professional engagement with Ricky, in fulfillment of which he neatly places a bullet hole in the middle of the gangster’s forehead. Carter’s no angel either. He’s ex–Special Forces, having spent a decade fighting and killing in the hardest places the U.S. deploys its military. More recently, however, he’s gone into business for himself, taking on the sort of contract work of the kind that’s introduced him to Ricky. Stunned by the swiftness of it all, a terrified Angel can only assume that she’s next, that this super cool and competent hit man will choose to eliminate witnesses, but when his first words to her are “Did you touch anything?” she rightly concludes that he, like the many others before him, has been well and truly smitten. So bad boy meets naughty girl, they click, have great sex, then team together to chase the MacGuffin: $500,000 of someone else’s payoff.

Solomita (Mercy Killing, 2010, etc.) serves up a spare, fast, unlikely noir romance that turns out to be highly entertaining.