Bedeviled

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The Bang Devils, a black-humored novel about a cross-cultural kidnapping gone wrong, is awash in gore. Joints are crushed, cartilage exposed, skulls pulped with crowbars, corpses mutilated, and most of the survivors sport fresh stumps in place of pinky fingers. First-time author Patrick Foss is more than happy to sacrifice lives and digits to keep the plot moving.

The cause of all this carnage is gaijin hubris—the belief, embraced by foolish foreigners, that one can get away with anything in Japan. Jessica Romano, a blond-bombshell nightclub hostess from Chicago, and Chris Ryan, a Floridian slacker and small-time drug pusher, have a particularly bad case. And who can blame them? Jessica spends her nights tending to infantile businessmen at a posh, Osaka club. Chris, a nobody back home, finds himself treated in Japan "like he was Tom Cruise or Brad Pitt"—after two months he has already bedded a dozen girls. So when Jessica hatches a scheme to kidnap a besotted executive who reneged on his promise to pay her a million dollars for sex, Chris jumps aboard. In a country full of gullible suits and sluts, what could be easier than extorting money from a sorry lecher?

Hubris meets poetic justice when Jessica's mark turns out to be a yakuza kingpin, and the arrivistes find that they—not the locals—are the naïfs. The story clips along as the kidnappers scramble to salvage their plan, but the breathless blow-by-blow narration leaves little room for the main characters to evolve beyond textbook-case stupid Americans. By the time the mobsters close in, we're rooting for a speedy end to the fiasco. In that, at least, the novel delivers.