God, I love Rachel Butler

Awhile back in Pages magazine, I did a special column on mass market thrillers and mysteries. The point was - and it's pasted in below - that there's plenty of fun reading coming out month after month, but you have to consciously look for it. So I "examined' a few current mass markets and featured one called The  Assassin, from Dell, by Rachel Butler . What a winner, in so many ways: Butler throws everything but the kitchen sink in her fervent stories - mistaken identity, heavy violence, a little sex now and then and whole lotta B movie-style soul searching. I just got an advance of her latest - it's a series featuring the spectacularly unbelievable hit lady Selena McCaffrey - and folks, it looks like another winner! As you'll note below, I give an example of the most wonderful purplish prose Butler frequently erupts, and just thumbing through this new one, Deep Cover, I found this scene: (Selena is getting whomped, it happens, okay? - but the girl knows how to fight back....) "Desperate for air, she clawed his fingers, his throat, his face. When she drew blood, he howled again and let go to punch her in the ribs again. A bone cracked as red-hot misery raced through her. He hit her again, and everything went black. She was going to pass out, and he would be free to kill her. Her arm trembled and her fingers were having difficulty responding to her brain's woozy commands. Once again she scratched at his face before finding his eye. When she gouged one nail deep into it, he screamed obscenities as blood began oozing down his cheek..."
Yes! Wow.
And here is an excerpt - with the  set up, on her first, from Pages, May - June 05:
Cheaper, and often, More Fun!
Hot, sexy hit women! Cops with partners' deaths on their conscience! Really mean, really grisly serial killers! And victims? Oh yeah, plenty of victims. They're all waiting for you  at your local supermarket, newsstand and hotel gift shop.
Welcome to the world of original paperback genre fiction. Readers who want to discover new authors without having to pay 20 plus dollars for the opportunity have plenty of choices at significantly less cost by turning to those often here-today-gone-tomorrow "pocket" books so easy to overlook. On the other hand, sometimes it's clear why these books begin italicsaren't end italics published in cloth editions: the writing tends to be a bit "riper", the plots can be filled with some  of the goofiest scenarios imaginable,  and literary aspirations non-existent...which to me is half the fun.
Take Rachel Butler's debut, "The Assassin" (Dell, April, $6.99), a thriller one  might think of as  a quintessential mass market original. We meet the beautiful, bi-racial Selena McCaffrey, rescued from the slums of Puerto Rico in the midst of an impoverished, abusive childhood, by a mysterious Oklahoman named William. Now a successful artist and  gallery owner in Key West, (but skilled in martial arts and the use of guns) Selena is summoned to crime-ridden Tulsa by her mentor/benefactor, apparently to  kill someone   who is complicating William's drug dealing business (it's payback time for all the  help she received from William). Ah, but it swiftly becomes complicated for Selena, too, as her love-hate relationship with William, who tightens the psychological leash he keeps her on, is tested by her intense attraction to Tony, the only Italian -American cop in town, and her supposed victim.
As the story proceeds, Butler can't help but relentlessly pile on the twists, bringing us to a violent conclusion. During a fight scene, a captive Selena fights back: "She grabbed hold of the wrist that covered her mouth, twisted it back, ducked...then  hit blindly, instinctively, with a heel-palm strike to his face, driving his nose upward with the force of the blow. Blood spurted, warm and plentiful, over her hand, but she ignored it...she cracked his head against the sharp corner of the cabinet behind him, felt his body buckle, then did it again for good measure."
Yet despite the preposterous elements, "The Assassin" is compulsively readable and Butler manages to ruminate over the effects of being betrayed by someone you believed you could trust.