The first in a threatened series of crime novels about Luther Ewing, a cop-on-the-edge designed to make all others look like The Simpsons' Chief Wiggum, Red Rain was written by Michael Crow, a pseudonym for "a prize-winning, critically acclaimed novelist." While there's no point in speculating on Crow's identity (the generic, sledgehammer prose offers no clues), an author of any repute would have good reason to hide behind his anonymity, if only to allow his most malevolent thoughts to go unchecked by concerns over literary reputation. Vile and repugnant in the kindest possible sense of those words, Red Rain strikes one in the genre's long tradition of devil's bargains, trading in every shred of social conscience for raw, breathless pulp momentum. Plunging into the literally fractured head of a vaguely fascist antihero, Crow's first-person narration gathers the force of a crazed but eerily rational mind as he wanders well outside the letter of the law. A Mike Hammer for sex-and-guns fetishists, Ewing works in the narcotics unit of the Baltimore County Police Department, trying to escape a past that refuses to loosen its grip. Honorably discharged after a bloody Gulf War incident involving his Special Forces unit, Ewing was recruited by the CIA for mercenary work in Bosnia, where his exceptional sharp-shooting skills downed upwards of 84 Serbs before a counter-sniper clipped his skull with a rifle shot. Just as he's settling into a relatively cushy job busting lightweights for Ecstasy possession, a ruthless gang of Russian mobsters moves heavier drugs into the city and attempts to take over the drug trade by force. When Ewing discovers that one of his fellow ex-mercenaries, a cagey thug named Vassily, is behind the movement, he embarks on a private mission to bring him down. In preparing for the final, harrowing confrontation between bad guy and really bad guy, Crow inflates their machismo to a comically superhuman level, to the point where they might as well be fighting on cloud-tops with lightning bolts. When he isn't bedding sex-starved 19-year-olds (the women are sketched with little more shading than Playboy centerfold statistics), Ewing opens up his Audi sports car to 125 on the highway and sculpts perfect circles from a great distance on the shooting range. A worthy adversary, Vassily stands at a hulking 6'5" with a death grip and an appetite for excess; by way of introduction, he consumes an entire bottle of vodka over dinner and leaves a $100 bill as a tip. It's hard to decipher how seriously Crow takes any of this—he doesn't endorse Ewing, yet he doesn't achieve any distance from him, either—but his outrageous amorality is one of the book's primary strengths. Daring itself to ever-greater heights of Grand Guignol sleaziness, Red Rain makes an appeal to the worst human instincts and comes out the better for it.