BOOK REVIEW: Zimbabwe Hustle by Nate Granzow

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Let’s cut right through the meat of the matter and get down to the bare, bloody bone—Zimbabwe Hustle is ferociously funny. Chuckles galore, as well as some full-fledged guffaws. If I was one of the cool kids instead of old enough to be a cool kid’s parent, I would cheekily say it made me LOL. (Wait, do cool kids still use that acronym now that even gray-haired grandmas know what it means?)

Award-winning author Nate Granzow knows his way around thrillers and he’s released some quality adventure literature over the years, but never before has he tried his hand at anything this overtly comedic. Oh, there’s drug dealers and hot strippers and nymphomaniac widows and Yakuza henchmen and the mandatory fisticuffs and gunplay the genre demands, but the elements are served up at a skewed angle designed to tickle your funny-bone. With its myriad of moving parts that all converge violently during the climax and its frequent moments of off-kilter humor, it’s a novel begging to become a movie directed by Quentin Tarintino.

Our agents of comedic chaos are a hard-drinking, braggadocios big-game hunting guide named Gabriel McCollough, and his nephew Callum Bailey, an ex-Hollywood stunt driver blackballed after erroneously eradicating an exotic sports car, now dodging projectile monkey dung as a menial zoo minion. They hatch a money-making scheme that seems so surface-level simple: tranquilize the zoo animals and allow rich wannabe hunters to be photographed with the sleeping creatures as if they had legitimately slain the beasts. The hunters get photographic proof of their machismo with which to impress their buddies, the animals get nothing more than a nice nap, and Gabriel and Callum get thousands of dollars richer.

Except their first client gets crushed by a not-quite-sleeping elephant, and his flattened corpse kicks off a chain of misfortune that simply must be read to be believed.

Granzow captures all the sordid, WTF moments with the skilled prose of a true professional, effortlessly juggling all the moving parts and smashing them together with the deft command of a genuine word-master. The so-called butterfly effect is in full swing here, where seemingly random, unrelated events wind up having a major impact when the brilliant climax is revealed.

Granzow has branched outside his usual niche, no doubt challenging himself as an author, and the result is the best book of his illustrious career. Zimbabwe Hustle is vastly entertaining, one of the most amusing novels I have read in quite some time. The outrageous scenarios, colorful characters, and witty dialogue will have you grinning from the lion testicles on the first page to the poignant twist on the last page. Yes, I said lion testicles … read it now, thank me later. Because even if you had to run barefoot across the African plains while being chased by starving hyenas in order to obtain a copy of this novel, it would totally be worth it.