The Get Off by Christa Faust
Hard Case Crime (March 18, 2025)
Reviewed by Blu Gilliand
In 2008’s Money Shot, former porn star Angel Dare was introduced to readers…and then promptly shot and left for dead in the trunk of a car. It wasn’t a flashback, and it wasn’t the end…not of the book, and not of the character.
Dare showed up next in 2011 in Choke Hold, emerging from a witness protection program to help out the son of a former co-star. At that point it felt like author Christa Faust was gearing up for an entire series of Angel Dare books, something I and a lot of other pulp/noir readers would have been ecstatic to have.
That’s not how things ultimately played out, and for a while it felt like we’d just have to be happy with two excellent entries. Luckily, Faust wasn’t done, bringing us to 2025 and the last of the Angel Dare trilogy, The Get Off.
The book starts out with Angel Dare doing Angel Dare things — specifically, seeking revenge on a man who’s done her wrong. She’s cooked up an elaborate scheme to get close to him, and is about to close the deal when it gets closed for her. The situation quickly dissolves into pure chaos, and Dare manages to escape…but not before commiting an act that sends her life careening down its last, inescapabley tragic path.
Dare goes into full survival mode, escaping into the west, finding herself embedded in the world of rodeos and bullfighting and cattle breeding. Her whole life is turned upside-down, with one revelation in particular that has her reeling. Her past is catching up with her at a rapid clip, assaulting her from all sides, and how she handles it all will determine if she’s going to burn out or fade away.
If I had to describe this book with one word, it would be “melancholy.” That’s not at all how I imagined I’d feel about this book, but here we are. The Get Off is loaded with action, written at a nearly relentless place, but there’s a sense of inevitability about it that makes it feel almost meditative.
Faust could have easily transformed Dare into one of those superhuman hero types, the kind that never age, never waver, and never give up. Honestly, I would have eaten that up. What we get instead is something more shocking, and far tougher to swallow: the truth. The truth about growing old when you probably should have died young. The truth about the glorified outlaw existence, romanticized in books and movies, but difficult and grinding in real life. The truth about mortality, and the way few of us get to write our own, perfect ending.
Heavy stuff for a pulp/noir novel. If you’ve read anything by Faust in the past, you won’t be surprised. If you haven’t, start with this trilogy and then track everything else down. Her work deserves to be read.
