Set in L.A., Lange's visceral, hard-hitting first novel puts him squarely in the ring with the best young neo-noir writers. Jimmy Boone, a former Marine and ex-con lying low and waiting out his probation by tending bar on Hollywood Boulevard, gets drawn back onto dangerous ground after he agrees to help his bouncer buddy, Robo, look into the death of a young Guatemalan immigrant found covered in infected dog bites on an MTA bus. Boone and Robo get on a trail that leads from a ghetto dope pad, where they rescue an abused and toothless fighting dog, to a secluded desert compound near Twentynine Palms, where a psychotic crime boss, Taggert, hosts bloody dog-fighting contests. Boone soon finds himself in way over his head as he comes up against Taggert's crew of degenerates. While the book contains some familiar set pieces, Lange, the author of the story collection Dead Boys, shows he has the potential to put his own distinctive mark on the mythology of Los Angeles. (June)
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"Anyone left who's keen on noirish flicks like Heat or Chinatown, or finds kindred spirits in Thomas McGuane, Denis Johnson, or Charles Bukowski, will find comrades among these dead men." Rocky Mountain News, Clayton Moore
"Ex-con tries to keep straight in this hard-boiled first novel....Compelling characters. Even the minor players are fully-formed, and Lange manages to depict a little bit of L.A. with each one....Smartly entertaining noir." Kirkus Reviews
"It's violent, it's truthful, and it's devastating." New York Times Book
Review, Marilyn Stasio"Lange draws indelible characters and writes deadeye dialogue, and his L.A. is as parched and pitiless as the desert that surrounds it....This Wicked World is wickedly good-and we have a feeling that Lange is just getting started." Booklist Keir Graff
"Lange is incapable of creating a character that isn't memorable. Even the most minor are indelibly sketched....Lange has a knack for miniature Southern California tableaux, those things that we notice out of the corner of our eyes....The zone where literary fiction meets genre fiction is a crowded borderland these days. With This Wicked World, Lange proves himself comfortable on both sides of the line." Los Angeles Times, Antoine Wilson
"Memorable....Richard Lange's first book set the bar so high that his sophomore effort had almost no chance of living up to the hype-except that it does, an L.A. Confidential for the 21st Century....It's a sharp, literary crime novel with the kind of lean and sparse prose that writers like Elmore Leonard and Richard Stark honed to a razor's edge. It's also a worthy entry in the proud tradition of Los Angeles noir novels started by James M. Cain and Raymond Chandler....A lot of writers try to write like this, but Lange just does it and he makes it work ." Daily BeastDavid, J. Montgomery
"Set in L.A., Lange's visceral, hard-hitting first novel puts him squarely in the ring with the best young neo-noir writers....Lange, the author of the story collection Dead Boys, shows he has the potential to put his own distinctive mark on the mythology of Los Angeles." Publishers Weekly
"Stylistically brilliant, painfully and truly observed and rendered, Dead Boys is not just one of the best collections thus far this decade: Dead Boys is one of the best short story collections of the past fifty years, right up there with Barry Hannah's Airships, Chris Offutt's Kentucky Straight, James Baldwin's Going to Meet the Man, and Flannery O'Connor's A Good Man Is Hard to Find." San Francisco Chronicle Eric Williamson
"The best debut collection we have read all year....You could shelve Lange between Denis Johnson, Richard Ford, and Richard Yates, and no fights would break out...Lange writes with tremendous heart." E! Online, Tod Goldberg
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