cover image Missy

Missy

Chris Hannan. Farrar Straus Giroux, $24 (295pp) ISBN 978-0-374-19983-8

This wildly entertaining first novel from Scottish playwright Hannan takes place in the down and dirty Wild West and features one of the most bombastic, fantastic heroines in recent memory. Nineteen-year-old Dol McQueen is an intelligent, strong-willed hooker with a weakness for liquid opium, or \x93missy.\x94 \x93Sometimes when I'm gonged,\x94 says Dol, \x93I have an immense feeling inside me that I can govern Chaos.\x94 And chaos is just what she gets when a crate of choice opium lands under her bed, stashed there by a grisly pimp called Pontius who warns her to keep quiet. Dol carries on with her business and gets increasingly attached to that fortune beneath her bed. The real pandemonium is unleashed when a spooky, brutal gang enlisted by the rightful owners of the opium arrives in town bringing mayhem. Dol\x97along with her mother, Pontius and the opium\x97flees into the desert, the escape slowed by lack of water, mule-pinching Indians and Dol's withdrawal from her missy, an experience that leaves her clearheaded but vulnerable to the truth about what she has become. Hannan nails the setting, crafts a sizzling plot and, with Dol, gives readers a lovable, larger-than-life star. (June)