Feb. 7 (Bloomberg) -- It's only February, but Christa Faust's ``Money Shot'' has to be an early contender for mystery debut of the year. Faust tells the story of Angel Dare, a retired porn star turned blue-movie agent, who finds herself on the run after the promise of a final bow before the cameras leaves her shot and left for dead.

``Money Shot'' has no peer in hardboiled writing about the sex industry. Not that Faust makes it look like an Amway convention. She knows there are sleazeballs in the business -- but she refuses to treat it as unique in that regard.

And she has a connoisseur's appreciation for the golden age of smut, writing sadly of the sameness of today's starlets, of the nastiness that feels so out of tune with the playfulness that was once the rule in dirty movies.

Faust accepts the existence of the gutter but doesn't construct her entire worldview from that level. In Angel she captures the wised-up but still vulnerable voice you can find in interviews with similar performers from the glory days.

Angel is shrewd without being cynical, hardnosed without being hardhearted. Joining her are a passel of vivid supporting characters of the kind Hollywood once specialized in.

``Money Shot'' is published by Hard Case Crime (252 pages, $6.99).

`The Last Striptease'

Michael Wiley makes some of the mistakes that Faust dodges in his own debut, ``The Last Striptease'' -- the first in a projected series featuring Chicago private dick Joe Kozmarski.

Summoned to clear a former associate's friend of the murder of his Vietnamese-American girlfriend, Kozmarski finds himself trawling the Chicago club circuit and the fringes of the amateur-porn business. Wiley isn't as Elmer Gantryish about porn as a lot of his colleagues in crime writing are. But the contemporary dirty movies he describes sound more like the stag reels shown at Elks Lodge smokers circa 1954.

Still, ``The Last Striptease'' has some good things going for it; this is hardboiled fiction with some tenderness and compassion. Kozmarski, a disgraced cop who's gone on the wagon and hopes to repair his broken marriage, has no macho bluster in him. At the end Wiley leaves him in a romantic triangle that could provide some erotic tension in the future.

He also makes Kozmarski a de facto daddy to his teenage cousin -- which may not be such a hot move. A first entry in a hardboiled series is too soon to tie a shamus down.

``The Last Striptease'' is published by Thomas Dunne/St. Martin's (247 pages, $23.95).

`Reasonable Doubts'

Either the deluge of Italian crime writing we've been seeing over the past year or so has deceived us by piling up all at once, or else those writers (and the expatriates who've made Italy their territory) are an astoundingly talented bunch. Even an only partially successful mystery like Gianrico Carofiglio's ``Reasonable Doubts'' is more striking for its craft than for its flaws.

The hero, Guido Guerrieri, is a defense lawyer who takes the case of a man accused of smuggling drugs into the country. The complications: The client is a former fascist thug who once beat up the young Guerrieri; and Guerrieri falls for -- and into bed with -- the guy's gorgeous half-Japanese wife.

Though the summing-up speeches need a good editor, the courtroom drama is exciting enough to make you wish the investigation leading up to it had dawdled less. Like Guerrieri, Carofiglio needs to shake some dust off his shoes. A young, good-looking, honest, sensible hero can get to be a drag, especially mooning about his estranged girlfriend. He could at least mope with a little more style -- more Sinatra, less Leonard Cohen.

But the near-mellow tone is pleasing. And one invention Carofiglio has come up with is a true reader's fantasy of the wee small hours: a bookstore whose hours are 10 p.m. to 6 a.m.

``Reasonable Doubts,'' translated by Howard Curtis, is published by Bitter Lemon Press (249 pages, $14).

(Charles Taylor is a critic for Bloomberg News. The opinions expressed are his own.)

To contact the writer of this story: Charles Taylor at ctaylor121@nyc.rr.com.

Last Updated: February 7, 2008 00:06 EST