Miriam “Mim” Bracca’s career seems to be unraveling–almost as fast as her life. After hitting the bottle too hard while on tour with her rock band, Tailhook, the 26-year-old guitarist is sent home to Portland, Oregon, where she’s expected to get some rest and get her head back in the music game. But as Greg Rucka makes clear in A Fistful of Rain, nothing remotely close to relaxation is in Mim’s immediate future.

Even before she can get through the front door of her house, Mim is kidnapped at gunpoint, forced into a truck and told to strip, then driven around for a while before being dumped back where she started, bewildered but unmolested. Shortly thereafter, nude photos of her turn up on the Internet, and her drug-dealing brother, Mikel–whom Mim fears helped make this pornography possible–is shot to death. The musician is quick to blame Mikel’s murder on their father, Tommy, who’s just won release after spending 15 years in prison for killing Mim’s mom; yet she concedes that such premeditated violence is probably beyond him. “He wasn’t a planner,” Mim says of the hated Tommy. “He was like me; life happened to us, we didn’t do things to life.” But then, who else would want to hasten the destruction this woman has already been bringing on herself? To find out, the petite and pissed-off Mim will have to elude police, confront a blackmailer in Portland’s “shanghai tunnels,” and stay sober long enough to stay alive.

I have been remiss in reviewing what I’ve been reading, but since finishing the Hunger Games trilogy a couple of months ago, I haven’t read much at all. (Yeah, you can ignore those titles on my sidebar.) I’ve tried, but my attention span these days has been nil – though I did finally finish Jo Nesbø’s The Redbreast which was awesome!

That all changed yesterday when I sat down and read Greg Rucka’s A FISTFUL OF RAIN. In one gulp. Which wasn’t really surprising since I did the same a few years ago with his book SHOOTING AT MIDNIGHT. I can’t get to his site right now to pull the back copy, so the above is from an Amazon review. And I can’t type up the back copy from the book since it was an impulse purchase and I downloaded the Kindle edition and read the whole thing on the 2″ x 1.5″ screen of my Blackberry Bold.

The prologue hooked me. The first chapter guaranteed I wasn’t going to put it down. The initial pace was a bit slow with some backstory and setup, but none of it was gratuitous. It was all information that played into the story development. Bottom line, I couldn’t read fast enough, and kept at it until I plugged in the Blackberry to recharge at 11:47 p.m. I’m just happy I started it at 5:00 so I didn’t have to stay up all night. ;)

Mim’s lifestyle was absolutely nothing I could relate to, but she was such a compelling character I knew exactly was she was going through – and why – and I felt every bit of her pain and fear and rooted for her. I loved Mim. She was a mess, she was responsible for being so, but she never expected or waited to be rescued. And she was smart. SO smart. Maybe a few moments of not smart (don’t we all have them *g*) but her choices made sense for her. A FISTFUL OF RAIN is a great read!