Title: Cut to the Bone Author: Robert Conner Publisher: Alyson I'm more than bored by the cloned caricatures of gay fiction where detectives get their man and solve the crime, or lovelorn misfits all end up in a bar spinning shit about of friendship and Sex in the City. Seems like Robert Conner is too. Cut to the Bone is 200 pages of blood and bashing, revenge killings and cartel deals gone way, way bad. Set in the Tex-Mex border town of Juarez, it opens with "So this estúpido, this bastard motherfuck, dickless dogfuck stupid mierda piece of shit ése, hijo de la chingada" and ends with a body count higher than a Peckinpah flick. The novel's main character, Santo De La O (a nod to Barry Gifford?), is a hit man and weapons dealer, wanting to do one last big deal so he can settle down to a life of languid fucking with his new partner Tony. Unfortunately a bunch of white supremacists and corrupt cops have different ideas, and all hell breaks lose, whilst in the background the war on drugs raises its ugly head. Santo becomes a man who has nothing to lose, a mean-as-fuck rattlesnake whose nest has been wiped out. Conner is on his mark with this reworking of the western genre, his solitary men are as ripped apart as any great outlaw with heart. Only a rare writer could talk about dicks and get away with "this male machinery, in its particular proportions and sizes, struck dead center on some lost and long silent chord." In the end, ghosts haunt us all and make this a book with real balls to savour.