Review: STINKING RICH by Rob Brunet

From the back of the book:

Danny Grant figures he's hit the big time when he lands a job growing pot for a backwoods biker gang. The Libidos are picky about their hires and prone to radical pruning when members go rogue. Members like Perko Ratwick, the aspiring Road Captain who stretched club rules to hire young Danny, putting his own patch-never mind his life-on the line if the punk screws up. What could possibly go wrong with a high school dropout left unattended in a barn full of high-grade marijuana? Plenty, it turns out. In a world where indoor plumbing's optional and each local wacko is more twisted than the last, drug money draws reprobates like moths to a lantern. From loveable losers to gnarly thugs and law-and-order wannabes, every last one of them has an angle-their best shot at being stinking rich. But Perko's got warped ideas about right, wrong, and retribution, and the gang's not far behind.

My Review:

I had a lot of fun reading STINKING RICH. Author Rob Brunet’s style can be likened to Carl Hiaasen (author of SKINNY DIP) and Marc Lecard (author VINNIES HEAD) in that STINKING RICH deftly trapeses the genre defying tight rope swaying either side of black humour and serious crime – well, at least in the minds of the biker gangsters.

For lead character Danny Grant, crime paves the way for some easy cash – and as for a murder rap? Well, that was an accident – the baseball bat, the dog, and the deceased, all in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Brunet has a gift to making a mockery of murder while still making the event plausible and within context; the aforementioned baseball bat incident a near perfect example. There’s also a laugh out loud near miss involving throwing knives and a mensroom door – I’ll leave that to the reader to discover.

While this is clearly Danny Grants’ story – a story of dreams, pot, and family amidst dodging bullets and dog bites, I thought it was Buzz and Skeritt, two peripheral characters that anchored the plot to the point of almost demanding further exploration. It’s always a good sign when an author is able to craft multi-dimensional characters that leap off the page and STINKING RICH is full of them.

STINKING RICH is due out in September from Down & Out Books – read more on the Rob Brunet’s website: http://www.robbrunet.com/