Review: Hoodtown, Christa Faust

Hoodtown is a terrific crime thriller with a hardboiled female investigator and one of the most interesting hooks of any crime story I've read. The setting is Hoodtown, a neighborhood of Angel City where the culture is based on lucha libre (Mexican masked wrestling) and the inhabitants of the area wear masks all the time, literally from birth. Legally. Residents are known by the gimmicks (style) of their hoods. Wearing a hood (or máscara) is such a part of their lives and identity that being hoodless is the worst possible thing that could happen to someone. As you might expect, this makes them third-class outside of their neighborhood where the non-hooded are callled Skins. As a metaphor for acceptance I don't think it is particularly heavy-handed. I think it's pretty clever.

The hero is X, a former luchadora (female wrestler) with a dark past that removed her from the ring. She makes her living giving private wrestling sessions to Skins. When a hood prostitute is found murdered in one of her aunt's buildings, she gets involved. The prostitute was peeled, left hoodless, an unthinkable desecration of the body. Since the Skin police are not particularly committed to solving the murder of a Hood prostitute, X takes it upon herself to avenge the victim. As other hoodless victims turn up, the need to find the murderer becomes more urgent.

Faust's skill in describing a culture where everyone wears a hood, where identity and social status are defined by the hood they wear, is remarkable and includes details that explain how a person could be hooded 24 hours a day (eg sleeping and washing their hair). I finished the book wishing that there was a real Hoodtown and that I could buy X an icy Tiniebla but I would stay out of the ring with her Note: in addition to being a beer, Tiniebla is also the name of a famous wrestler who had a comic book series as well as a film career.

Faust writes Micky Spillane tough and Hoodtown is a hardboiled story with snappy dialog and fights built on wrestling techniques. Here is the first paragraph:

Name's X. I'm a wrestler, at least I used to be. They used to call me the Ice Queen, on account of my ice-colored eyes and emotionless persona in the ring. I'm a ruda, a stone cold bitch and no kinda hero, but I still have a story that needs telling. Oh, right, and in case you couldn't tell by this mask on my head, I'm a hood.

Great stuff and a fun read. Highly recommended if you like a hardboiled protagonist willing to apply Mike Hammer justice and are up for a culture most of us could never have imagined before this book. Well written, paced, and plotted.

Faust includes a glossary that includes descriptions of wrestling moves and translations of "interesting" Spanish words. This allows her to keep the narrative flowing without having to explain terms, which I appreciated.

Hoodtown is available in Kindle format from Amazon.