Joe Hustle

From an award-winning author, Joe Hustle has never had much luck--but things start looking up when he meets an intriguing new woman and scores a rare windfall. Can he outrun disaster long enough to turn things around?

Joe Hustle is a survivor. A Gulf War vet and ex-con always one stumble away from catastrophe, he manages to scrape together enough money from various jobs to eke out a precarious existence on the darker fringes of Los Angeles. When he meets Emily, the black-sheep daughter of a wealthy family, the two spark an instant connection--she seems like the best thing to happen to him in a while.

But their whirlwind romance is put to the test when what starts out as a simple favor for a friend leaves Joe homeless, unemployed, and on the wrong side of a vengeful drug dealer. An impulsive offer to go on a road trip with Emily promises to take them out of harm’s way--but may only lead to more chaos.

Part hard-boiled love story, part thriller, part portrait of a tormented yet resilient soul, Joe Hustle ratchets up the tension as it rockets from the after-hours clubs and dive bars of the mean streets of L.A. to the mansions of the Hollywood Hills and, finally, to the desolate highways of the Southwest. What emerges is a gritty portrait of a man who may be down but can never be counted out.

Richard Lange is the author of the story collections Dead Boys and Sweet Nothing and the novels This Wicked World, Angel Baby, The Smack, and Rovers. He is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, the International Association of Crime Writers’ Hammett Prize, a Crime Writers’ Association Dagger Award, and the Rosenthal Family Foundation Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He lives in Los Angeles.