Shooters

Hot L.A. fashion photographer Nick Gardner, the narrator of this frantic noir thriller, doesn't make obvious moves. When bombshell porn queen Candice Bishop turns up dead in his dumpster after a wild night of sex and drugs, the obvious move would be for Nick to call up the hot music-video director who set him up with the girl and the coke. But Nick doesn't pursue his innocence like an ordinary man, because he doesn't feel innocent or ordinary. He feels like ""one of the great losers of all time."" A hopeless morality tale about the wages of lust and greed, this novel nevertheless offers a stylish twist on classic noir. Nick isn't just shadowed by a dark past, he insists on it, eager as he is to assume responsibility for his actions yet refusing to believe in any kind of forgiveness or redemption. All the ingredients for a classic thriller are here, in an out-of-the-past plot that reaches back to when Nick had another name and another life as a ""shooter""--a director of quickie porn flicks. Yet first-novelist Lankford doesn't succeed in making edgy, sensation-driven Nick sympathetic enough to generate compassion, or even much interest. And while he invests his narrative, which hinges on a snuff film, with considerable energy, he fails to invest the fictional universe it inhabits with the implacability necessary to make Nick's predicament, and subsequent fate, strike home with tragic force. Film rights to TriStar. (Feb.)