Joe Hustle, Richard Lange
Joe Hustle, Richard Lange
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Joe Hustle
A Novel

Author: Richard Lange

Narrator: Kiff VandenHeuvel, Will Collyer

Unabridged: 6 hr 48 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 06/25/2024


Synopsis

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.

About Richard Lange

Richard Lange is the author of the story collections Dead Boys and Sweet Nothing and the novels This Wicked World, Angel Baby, and The Smack. 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.


Reviews

Goodreads review by Anthony on January 18, 2025

Just too damned good. Lange is one-of-a-kind and I hope he inspires an entire generation of crime writers the same way Elmore Leonard did.......more

Goodreads review by Matthew on August 25, 2024

This author hits all the high notes for me. Gritty, flawed but basically good characters who grow on you and get under your skin. Doc Pomus said it best, when talking about Richard Lange's musical equal, and he could have been talking about Richard Lange. "He knows the truth of a city street and the......more

Goodreads review by B. Kirby on July 15, 2024

I’ll be the first to say, I love Lange’s writing. I’ve read 2 or 3 of this books and always love them and they read so easy. But I just can’t for the life of me figure out what the point of this one was. If you want to read about a guy who can’t really get ahead in life and just a day by day walk in......more

Goodreads review by MM Suarez on August 28, 2024

"If there’s a hell, everyone I’ve ever met is going there. If there’s a heaven, it’s only for dogs." Not what I was expecting after reading Angel Baby but still a good read and great writing. To say Joe is a hard-luck case is understating the situation, born to trouble, raised by trouble, and pickin......more

Goodreads review by Colin on July 31, 2024

A brutally stunning novel.......more


Quotes

"Joe Hustle may be the best novel yet from the always reliable Lange: a harrowing and occasionally hilarious character study in resilience. This is a home run."—Publishers Weekly (starred review)

"Lange describes a sunset with wind that is 'hot and pushy. Black clouds limned with moonglow roll in.' Later, 'a persistent orange glow keeps the stars at bay.' This eloquence stands in stark contrast to the story detailing the state of the counterculture in Southern California, a sad world of idlers, stoners, and parasites, pessimism and depression. Joe Hustle is in this world but not totally of it . . . The uproar in the last quarter of this hard-knocks, atmospheric tale offers hope, however tentative and half-hidden."—Don Crinklaw, Booklist

"The latest novel by a first-rate storyteller refusing to be pigeonholed . . . Lange is best known for cuttingly funny novels about killers, dealers, and con men . . . Here, though not without an assortment of bad deaths, he returns to the romantic mode of The Smack (2017), with a beautifully toned-down story about a pair of mismatched characters who win our sympathy not in spite of their doing and saying dumb things, but because they just can’t help it. It’s a real pleasure to read."—Kirkus Reviews (starred)

Joe Hustle is downright brilliant—delightfully dark, deeply poetic, and a little bit heartbreaking. Richard Lange’s novel is a masterclass noir filled with the twisted souls and grisly pleasures of down-and-out Los Angeles. I goddamned loved it.”—Ivy Pochoda, author of Sing Her Down

“Lange is Shakespeare with a shank. His writing comes straight from noir’s obsidian heart, and it cuts to the bone. This novel is a dark love song, a long poem about being so damn low you can walk under a snake. Each line Lange writes is a firecracker, and Joe Hustle is a whole lotta dynamite.”—Gabino Iglesias, author of The Devil Takes You Home

Joe Hustle takes us into a rich, vividly sleazy underworld in the company of a protagonist that we grow to  care about deeply. Richard Lange is one of our very best practitioners of noir, and this book is yet another gem.”
 —Dan Chaon, author of Sleepwalk

“Lean and mean. Hard-boiled and hard-hitting. Gritty and noir-y and full of hangdog heart. That’s what this piping hot serving of Angeleno crime fiction is. Richard Lange’s Joe Hustle crawls under your skin and stays there till the last page.”
 —Gregg Hurwitz, author of Lone Wolf and the Orphan X novels

"Lean and gritty, thoughtful and nuanced, Joe Hustle delivers all the goods, right down to my favorite final page in years. It's a book with the muscle to keep you up all night and the heart to haunt you the next day. I'll read anything Richard Lange writes."—Michael Koryta, author of An Honest Man

"As he spends his life cycling through odd jobs and making questionable life choices, veteran Joe Hustle’s main credo is ‘don’t die.’ A wonderfully bittersweet and darkly humorous tale, Richard Lange’s Joe Hustle is part love story and part recorded memoir of a man whose main goal is to just make it through life alive. Hard to put down and easy to get lost in."—David Swinson, author of The Second Girl and Sweet Thing

Praise for Richard Lange's Rovers: