by JULIET WATERS

Summer is the season for those big, long, lazy vacation books that suck you in, but what about Indian summer? In the next month you may find yourself suddenly with a few hours of extra porch time. There’s not much point in starting any of those big books you didn’t get around to, since work or school is more likely to be the thing sucking you in these days. This might be a good time of the year to discover Irish noir stylist Ken Bruen.

A master minimalist, Bruen has never written the kind of thick genre novels that make for good airport bestsellers. But among those who do (George Pelecanos, Ian Rankin, Dennis Lehane), Bruen is considered a crime writer’s crime writer. His latest novel, Vixen, is timely—to an eerie extreme.

Published first in the U.K. in 2003, its central villain is a female serial killer who’s on a mission to extort money from the police by setting off bombs in East London. A born psychopath, Angie James (yes, it’s an obvious part for Angelina Jolie) is attractive, devious and shallow. Everything she knows about being a woman seems to have been learned from women’s magazines. Everything she knows about killing, however, seems to come pretty naturally. All she needs is a good/bad man to do the dirty work.

Basically, she’s Karla Homolka—or, more accurately, for those still willing to entertain the possibility that life might be more complicated than a pared-down noir thriller, she’s Karla Homolka as popular culture enjoys presenting her. Bruen’s not much for character development, though his characters aren’t lacking in personality. So anyone who’s looking for nuance is not going to find much of it here, but they will find characters who keep the plot entertaining and often, when you’re least expecting it, funny.

Angie’s picked a fine police force to fuck around with. The East End London cops of Bruen’s world seem to be only marginally smarter, more honest and more ambitious than your average street thug, and often not even that. Fans of HBO’s The Wire will recognize the general sense of apathy, brutality and corruption that pervade this police force, making it feel, sadly, all too realistic.

There are a few cops who rise above the rest—in competence, if not morality. We first meet Inspector Brant getting a blowjob from a local hooker. A sharp dresser (in his mind anyways) and basically a total motherfucker, Brant would be a great role for Ian McShane. You have to have a pretty nasty villain to make Brant look like the hero. Our sympathy is more likely to go to Police Constable Elizabeth Falls, but not for long. A young, black police officer, she finds herself becoming more and more like Brant every day, to the point where she’s the number one suspect in a still unsolved case of extreme police brutality. Of all the characters in Vixen, Falls is the most interesting and original, and when she meets up with Angie... lets just say that if anyone did get the bright idea to adapt this for Jolie, there’s serious potential here for a very famous girl-on-girl film moment.

Bruen is an impressive stylist and an intelligent, though not especially remarkable, writer. “A Celtic Dashiell Hammett,” as he’s been called, is an overstatement, and there’s a cynicism at the heart of Vixen that’s been hammered in a few too many times by the end. Like his dozen or so other novels, however, it is a quick, entertaining, smart, brutal little read that will hit the spot nicely for any noir fan.

Vixen by Ken Bruen, St Martin’s, pb, 201pp, $16.95