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3.0

A Pulp Fictiony intertwined tale of three tropey characters: a boxer who gets tied up with the mob because of generational family violence, a Vietnam vet with a haunted past has to get free of the same said mob after a heist goes awry, and a woman is OF COURSE sexually victimized and becomes a drug addict trying to break herself free of the violence we've seen in the previous two stories.

It's a massive step up from volume two, but it's still a bunch of tired cliche characters. Without the previous volume for scope and comparison, I might have given this a two-star rating, but the characters, trite as they are, at least seem significantly more realistic than the characters in "Lawless".

I mainly recommend this as a gauge to see how much better both Brubaker and Phillips have become in the intervening years. As they've since crafted similarly themed stories but with more original character motivations, and a better use of body language and facial grammar (the eyes in these first three volumes have been comically reactive in a way that I can't decide if I like).