Ridley is a screenwriter by trade (he was the screenwriter for the movie "U-Turn" which was based on his book "Stray Dogs" and the screenwriter for the comedy "Undercover Brother") and his book has a very visual element to it. It reads VERY much like a movie script. This is not always a good thing.
The book takes place in Los Angeles and Las Vegas. Paris Scott is a thirty something loser who works the nightshift at an LA mini-mart and just got dumped by his girlfriend. He happens to be working one night when he runs across Ian Jermaine. (a barely disguised Kurt Cobain incarnation) Paris tries to take the depressed rock star back to his hotel room but once they arrive Jermaine commits suicide. Paris winds up with Jermaine's unreleased final recording. He returns home and hides this recording in his sofa.
Meanwhile Paris' roommate-a wannabe gangsta- has just completed a ripoff of the meanest heroin dealer on the West Coast, one Daymond Evans. The roommate hightails it back to the apartment where he also hides the heroin in the sofa.
Neither man tells the other what he was up to and both proceed to try to negotiate a reselling of the "stolen" material to the record company and the drug dealer. As both men are thorougly inept at this the record company and dealer decide that they would just as soon kill them and retrieve their "merchandise". However they get the men confused and send the wrong people after each man. Both men go on the run separately. Something approaching hilarity ensues as Ridley does a accurate satire of the common predatory tactics to be found in Hollywood and the underworld.
However ultimately the book is sort of thin. It's quite "Tarantinoesqe" for anyone who likes that sort of thing. The most vibrant character is not Paris, who spends most of the book whining, wishing he had money for strippers, getting beat up or shot at, but Brice, a hitwoman with the psychology of Luca Brasi, the looks of Scarlett Johannsen and a taste for Bachmann-Turner Overdrive.
"When the snows fall and the white winds blow, the lone wolf dies but the pack survives." Winter is Coming Now this is the Law of the Jungle—as old and as true as the sky; And the wolf that shall keep it may prosper, but the wolf that shall break it must die. As the creeper that girdles the tree-trunk, the Law runneth forward and back; For the strength of the Pack is the Wolf, and the strength of the Wolf is the Pack.
