The Zero Effect
Note: You cannot "search inside"Just short of Bruce Lee, whoever you are, Nina Zero will beat you up. Once a pigtailed, pink-nailed good girl, Nina Zero accidentally blew up a terminal at LAX and, in her mission to discover who set her up, she unleashes her inner punk rock superhero. When she gets released from jail (in the second book, Killing Paparazzi) she becomes the eponymous and despised celeb photographer. She prowls the streets of L.A. looking for justice, finding who's responsible, though she is constantly sidetracked by untrusting cops. She claims not to be a sadist, she doesn't like to inflict pain, but it doesn't really seem to bother her that much either. Her time in prison wasn't wasted, she comes out the other side well read and extremely competent in a number of criminal enterprises, which she uses to her best advantage.
Los Angeles plays a huge part in these books, vividly describing the bright cleanliness of the desert, the shining ocean, the noir streets of Hollywood and the Hills. As Nina cruises the whirling ribbons of freeway, she muses on the nature of celebrity, her past and stays carefully away from any thoughts of the future. More than anything, LA is Nina's partner, her only friend in the world, it accepts her as she is, a woman made hard by her childhood, by her tough breaks, someone who accepts that she may not be a good person, though she always hopes to gain a purity that is ephemeral in her world -- perhaps nonexistent.
Not for the faint of heart, (in the first book is an aggressively graphic torture scene), these books, with their easy voice and shocking brutality really bring forward one of the first heroines to be the kind of vigilante usually limited to comics and the silver screen. Though having no evident super powers, Nina still gets the upper hand with guys many times her size. She may be too masculine in some ways (as penned by author Robert Eversz), but she remains an original. Nina Zero is such a hard-ass, she could make Clint Eastwood cry like a girl.
Shooting Elvis, Killing Paparazzi, Digging James Dean and Burning Garbo by Robert Eversz
posted by kuaptic. @ 9:06 AM
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