Choke Hold by Christa Faust

Former porn star Angel Dare comes out of witness protection to help an old friend. She agrees to watch out for her former co-stars son, Cody. He is an rising star in the MMA, a good fighter wanting to advance his career.

Things take a turn when their lives are in danger and they must fight to stay alive. No one is safe and Angel will not go down without a fight.

A fast paced page turning wild ride. Angel is a fighter in every way possible. A strong female lead who will fight to death, to help her friends. Full of intense edge-of-your-seat moments. I was hooked from the first page until the end.

Overall I found Choke Hold enjoyable and highly recommend to those who like thrilling crime. I also suggest the first Angel Dare book Money Shot. ( )

A former lover of Angel Dare's walks into a diner where she's working until she can arrange a new identity and embroils her in a new set of complications. Angel's already hiding out from Croatian criminals that she fell afoul of in Faust's first Angel Dare novel, MONEY SHOT.

Angel's ex-lover, Vic, is meeting his 18-year old son, Cody, and when Vic is gunned down in the diner, he extracts a promise from Angel that she'll look out for Cody.

Cody is determined to compete to become a fighter in a Las Vegas Mixed Martial Arts show, so Angel has two priorities, keeping Cody and his fighting mentor, Hank, from getting killed, and getting Cody to his fighting competition.

Angel has her work cut out for her, especially when the Croatians show up again. They're still angry she exposed their sex-slave operation and they're seeking revenge.

CHOKE HOLD is a spare story, with action aplenty and little sentimentality. It rolls along from one calamity to the next until its dark, brutal ending. Those looking for expansive descriptions of the MMA fight scene will be disappointed. However, those looking for a tale from an evolving voice of gritty angst should be well-satisfied. ( )

Yes! Visceral, and brutal. Angel Dare is a fantastic protagonist. More please... ( )

This is the sequel to the brilliant, instant classic, "Money Shot" which introduced ex-porn star and noir heroine Angel Dare. It is a superb thriller, packed full of page-turning suspense, blazing action and a witty, hard-boiled noir sensibility. The characters are all cut from classic noir cloth, with each in turn combining a lost soul aspect with a mixture of good intentions and bad decisions. The characters are all trying their best in a sordid world, but a mix of naivety, foolish choices and self-indulgence leaves them lost and adrift in a deadly, dark world. Best of all, however, is Angel Dare herself; the beautiful but jaded porn queen, blasting her way through a sordid underworld, while fending off her own insecurities about intimacy and encroaching middle age. Angel is a hugely compelling character, who is beautifully written and developed by Christa Faust. Faust's writing is fast, sharp and intense, with a real feel for a hardboiled exchange and turn of phrase. "Choke Hold" is an outstanding noir thriller that more than lives up to the pyrotechnics of its powerful predecessor. The ending of the book, happily, leaves the way open for a further instalment and hopefully it won't be too long before we see Angel's adventures becoming a trilogy. ( )

Choke Hold is the sequel to Christa Faust's first book for the Hard Case Crime imprint, Money Shot, featuring the ex-porn star turned owner of a talent agency for women in the adult entertainment industry, Angel Dare (this is her professional name). Following the calamitous events of Money Shot, Angel is a fugitive on the run, using a series of false identities, trying to escape the clutches of the one rat bastard she didn't kill, who has somehow compromised the new identity that the U.S. Marshals WitSec program established for her. Within the first two chapters of Choke Hold, Angel runs into an ex-boyfriend who starred in porn movies under the name of "Thick Vic" Ventura, sees her current inamorata of convenience, a "firearms enthusiast" who owns the diner in Yuma, Arizona that she currently works at, get killed, sees Vic get fatally injured shortly after reuniting with his 18-year-old son, Cody, at said diner, and has Vic extract a promise from her before he dies to watch out for Cody, who turns out to be an MMA fighter hoping to enter a reality TV tournament in Las Vegas. Given that the "firearms enthusiast" was her middleman in her attempt to secure a fake passport so that she could flee the country and the Croatian goons who are out for revenge following the events in Money Shot, this is a complication that Angel does not exactly welcome.

While Choke Hold starts out at a breakneck pace, it soon idles down into a long stretch of doldrums, although it manages to pick up speed in its last third. If anything, the ending of Choke Hold is even more balls-to-the-wall than that of Money Shot; while I can just imagine, barely, a U.S. movie adaptation of Money Shot, there's no way in hell that any Hollywood studio would touch Choke Hold with a barge pole: the ending is too bleak, and the incidents that fill the book are too sordid and squicky for a Hollywood long past the bad-boy swagger that ran from 1969's Midnight Cowboy to 1980's Cruising. It would take a European director to tackle Choke Hold without significantly diluting it; maybe Gaspar Noé or Nicholas Winding Refn.

Choke Hold suffers from more editorial errors than Money Shot did, possibly due to the kerfuffle of the Hard Case Crime line switching publishers: a Bonneville is referred to as a Buick instead of a Pontiac in Chapter 3 ("I'm sure there were seatbelts somewhere in that old Buick..."); the word "nauseous" is continuously used to indicate that Angel feels nauseated (unfortunately, "nauseous" appears to be well on the way to have the same meaning as feeling nauseated one's own self, rather than its original meaning of causing others to feel nauseated, at least in American English); a bullet is described, in Chapter 5, as looking "like a tiny hardon" instead of "like a tiny hard-on"; Lalo Malloy, from Money Shot, is referred to here as "an old friend," when he decidedly wasn't (he'd only been working for Angel's talent agency for a couple of months before she was obliged to call on him for help; they parted as something both more and less than friends); and there are several incorrect compound words used instead of hyphenated words, such as, in Chapter 12, "largebreasted instead of "large-breasted," "bigbreasted" instead of "big-breasted," and "passedout" instead of "passed-out."

But by far the biggest editorial and authorial mistake of Choke Hold is the soft-soaping of the conclusion of its predecessor, Money Shot; quite frankly, I remain incredulous that Angel didn't "[go] down for multiple murder," even if she did "testify against a bunch of scumbags who were importing underage Eastern Bloc girls for sex" (Chapter 14). Angel is an interesting and fun character, and I can well understand the temptation to revisit her that the author and publisher faced; but whatever shred of believability that Money Shot managed to retain after its nearly Grand Guignol finale is thrown out the window by this single incredible, though necessary, precondition to set up Choke Hold. It would've been better had Choke Hold been set even longer after the conclusion of Money Shot, and had Angel actually served some time for her actions in Money Shot, which included at least two instances of cold-blooded murder.

A final word of advice to the prospective reader of Choke Hold: as with Money Shot, Angel's (at this point) former profession and still-current proclivities are apt to put some readers off of her, as she is sex-positive, and therefore unapologetic for having been a porn actress and head of a talent agency representing porn actresses, or for "letting [her] pussy drive," to cite a line from the penultimate paragraph of Chapter 11. It's a sad commentary on the perceived "acceptable" roles for women in American society that what would pass with a yawn in a male character is a matter of some controversy in a female character. ( )