Regret Things

Nicki McJacob has big eyes and breasts to match and a past that just showed up at her front door. Nicki stepped off a pin-up calendar, all red hair and big dreams and heads turned with each room she walks into, and stepped into New York like she had something to prove. But that’s another story, told in flashbacks. This book starts with a doorbell rung, the wrong type of dinner company disturbing an ideal evening at home for hunky husband John, Nicki, and their two kids.

And with that doorbell’s ring, the rolling smooth language of this sexy noir takes you in, it walks you into a warm bath of trouble you didn’t realize would feel so good. This is classic noir, where the guys hold the guns, but the girl holds the real power.

Regret Things is made by Ingwalson’s stylized rhythmic sentences, abrupt, then lolling, in all the right places. His words read effortlessly, and it pushes the reader forward. At times, his writing feels heavy on the atmospheric scenes, leaving the bigger plot points short on attention. The plot itself, in its back and forth between past and present, has some great turns.

As her past rudely arrives on her doorstep, Nicki bolts, hoping to ditch it once again. As we learn just what she’s running from in alternating chapters, we also watch Nicki in the present wrapping an array of vibrant characters around her ever-petulant little finger. There’s Grant, a borderline sex addict public speaker who teaches people to “love the microphone” and swears he’ll stop sizing up beautiful women, but then, oh, look at that waitress. There’s Nicki’s arthritic sharp-shooting uncle, who trained her troubled little bro. Her little brother is Sin, a quiet, lethal skinny kid covered in tats. But at the center of all these guys, this is Nicki’s breezy, bullet-holed story.