Hotshot Books in Order

The Hotshot books are Mike Faricy at his most openly comic. Instead of following one detective or one continuing crime network, this series jumps from one set of strivers, crooks, halfwits, and desperate dreamers to another. The common thread is simple: somebody thinks they have found an easy score, and they are very, very wrong.

That is the whole engine.

These books are standalones, so you can read them in any order. Reduced Ransom! opens with Mickey and Dell deciding that bargain-rate kidnapping sounds like a smart business model. Finders Keepers throws a deadbeat schemer, a fed-up girlfriend, and mob money into the same room. Bankers Hours and Chow Down keep the same spirit going with fresh characters and another round of small ambitions colliding with bigger criminal realities. In Moonlight Dance Academy, an unemployed pair flee to Florida with a dance-school burglary plan that is almost too ridiculous to fail, except of course it does.

What links the series is tone. These are crime stories, and the stakes are real, but the comedy comes from character more than punch lines. Faricy likes people who are just smart enough to start a bad plan and not smart enough to stop it in time. He gives them motives that make a grubby sort of sense, money problems, wounded pride, revenge, lust, boredom, and then watches everything tilt out of shape.

There is no single hero to root for in the usual way. Sometimes the main characters are sympathetic fools. Sometimes they are selfish and slippery. Sometimes they are both in the same chapter. That looseness is part of what makes Hotshot fun. Faricy is not building a long mythology here. He is setting up capers and letting human weakness do the rest.

The settings shift a bit more than in his detective series, but the world still feels recognizably his. These are people living just under respectable surfaces, in cheap schemes, backroom deals, shaky romances, and criminal plans that seem manageable right up until the professionals arrive. The humor is dry, the pace is quick, and the consequences usually arrive at a run.

If you like your crime fiction smaller in scale, crooked in spirit, and happy to laugh at terrible judgment, Hotshot is a very easy Faricy series to dip into. There is no complicated commitment. Just pick the premise that sounds most disastrous and start there.