BORN TO BLEED by Ryan C. Thomas

The Summer I Died was one of the hardest books to read due to the extreme graphic violence but was still wholly satisfying as a story. So I wanted to read its sequel but had to take a deep breath before jumping into this one. 

But nope, I still wasn’t prepared…

Roger Huntington, who barely survived that first book is trying to manage his trauma and has attempted to move on, relocating to Los Angeles and working as a painter of serene woods scenes. But that doesn’t last long, as trouble catches up with him again. 

The violence and depravity is just as hard-hitting in this book and the author still manages to deftly touch on the long-term affects of trauma and how it changes Roger in ways that he never expected, where he’s constantly questioning what kind of person he might be becoming. 

GRADE: B+

A TOUCH OF DEATH by Charles Williams

This is another banger by Charles Williams, where a broke ex-football player gets sucked into a robbery plot by a scheming brunette in a bikini. 

…looking like something the censors cut out of a sailor’s dream.

It really stands out because not only was it constantly surprising but it features one of the coolest femme fatales in the genre, a master manipulator that never once used sex to seduce our lead sucker, because she simply doesn’t need it, she’s that good. Seriously, I constantly kept waiting for the clothes to come off but was always surprised. In fact, the moment that the two meet, they hate each other, and the hate only grows hotter as the story moves forward. 

You’re a business proposition to me, a hundred and twenty thousand dollars’ worth of meat to be delivered on the hoof.

The other thing that grows is the tension, which is the real star of the show here. The moment the plot gets going, the suspense never lets up, and I was right there in the protagonist’s shoes, not sure how much more I could take, and nearly yearning for the police to just catch them already or for the double-crosses to happen, if only to allow me to breathe for a bit. And when the ending comes, it’s not like I didn’t see it coming, but I didn’t expect it to be as satisfying. While this one isn’t as much of a slam-dunk classic as Hell Hath No Fury (The Hot Spot), it’s still a fantastic noir by Charles Williams. 

There were no days now. Time had melted and run together into one endless and unmarked second of waiting for an explosion when the fuse was always burning and forever a quarter of an inch long. 

GRADE: A-