Books: Gunsmith Cats Revised Edition Vol. 3 (Kenichi Sonoda)

Every time I crack the spine to another Gunsmith Cats omnibus collection (this is #3 out of 4), I end up with the same lopsided smile. Female bounty hunters, prostitutes turned explosives experts, drivers-for-hire, criminals, cops, and assorted underworld scum — it’s the best of every Hollywood action movie rolled into one, and it’s all in a manga. Heck, if all four Lethal Weapon movies had ended up being this good, I might never have gotten disenchanted with Mel Gibson.

Volume 3 opens with Rally Vincent, everyone’s favorite bounty hunter and girl gunslinger, still trying to live down the mess from the end of the last book. After being dosed with a powerful hallucinogen, Rally’s had her gun license pulled in the interest of public safety — and Rally without a gun is like a fish in an empty swimming pool. Worse, everyone around her makes the ghastly mistake of rubbing her nose in it (again, and again), and gun license or not, she’s determined to catch up to the man who screwed things up so badly: Bean Bandit, the man you hire to drive cargo from A to B , no questions asked. Rally goes after Bean and discovers, to her fury, he’s about to cut a deal to run another batch of the same drug that messed her up. Never one to pass up a challenge, Bean cuts her a deal: if she can prevent the whole thing from going down without firing a single bullet or calling in the cavalry, he’ll swear off dealing with the drug gangs for good.

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