The good guy: Charlie Hardie, a professional house sitter who used to work with the Philadelphia police force. Something went very wrong a few years ago, and now Charlie watches houses for rich people on extended stays. He passes the time by parking on the couch, watching old movies, and getting blotto.
The femme fatale: Lane Madden, a B-movie actress with a reputation to match Lindsay Lohan’s. When someone tries to kill her on the freeway, she escapes and ends up in a house that Hardie has been hired to watch. Now, both Madden and Hardie are the targets of…
The bad guys: A sinister and highly-secret group of killers called “The Accident People” who are under the employ of the motion picture industry elite. Their job is to ensure that the ultra-rich remain ultra rich by getting rid of anyone who poses a threat to their profits, and to do so in a way that rules out foul play.
Duane Swierczynski, a veteran comic book and TV writer, takes this over-the-top premise and turns it into a terrifically entertaining, white-knuckle roller-coaster-ride of narrow-escapes, double-crosses, and cat-and-mouse moves between Hardie and a terrifyingly psychopathic leader the Accident People unit assigned to rub out Madden.
Truths are peeled away like layers of an onion. By the end of Fun & Games, we have some answers, but not all of them. It turns out that Fun & Games is the first novel of a trilogy, called The Charlie Hardie series. The second installment, Hell & Gone is out now, and the final novel, Point & Shoot, comes out April 30.
Good news: Fun & Games in paperback is just $(removed) and the Kindle edition is on sale for a limited time for $(removed)