My Juliet: A Novel

In John Ed Bradley's well-wrought page-turner, doom hovers over every encounter. Sonny LaMott is a down-and-out painter in New Orleans, selling bad portraits to tourists for $40 a pop. Years ago the city seemed romantic and important to him, a place fit for a Tennessee Williams backdrop. These days all that has turned into cliché. Everything he paints looks like something from a gift shop postcard. The real reason for Sonny's cynicism becomes clear in a scene where he watches a porn video starring the object of his adolescent desire: 15 years later, Juliet Beauvais, his femme fatale and first love, has gone into hardcore. When she returns to New Orleans unexpectedly, Sonny falls quickly under her spell again. The novel's tension resides with Juliet and her wild appeal: she can make men grovel at her feet, even kill for her. Determined to whack her mother and collect her inheritance, Juliet manipulates Sonny, trying to convince him that he's not really a cheesy artist--he's a glamorous hit man. And she's not really a drug-addled porn star, she's the woman who will save his life.

With My Juliet John Ed Bradley (Tupelo Nights, Love and Obits) proves he has a gift for crazy women. While most hard-boiled writers of this genre, including masters like James Ellroy, tend to dodge the interior lives of their screwed-up ladies, he paints a rich portrait of a woman on the edge--narcissistic, deeply damaged, unable to find peace or pleasure. She's also funny, complaining to herself that it's "oppressively, stupidly hot," and thumbing through a self-help book she finds on an airplane, "she reads half a page before encountering a trash can on the main concourse and throwing it away." Juliet doesn't believe in self-help or redemption; she believes in money, sex, her own powers of persuasion. Bradley makes her chillingly believable, and she's the one who propels this novel's atmosphere of guilt, doom, and dark pleasure. --Emily White