Reviewed by Christian Sia for Readers' Favorite

Lou Powers unleashes an exciting, globe-trotting farce following Jimmy Eyebrow, a catastrophically inept “budget hitman” living under the witness relocation program as Max Von Steel in The Full Package. Jimmy’s disastrous adventures start when he attempts to launch a murder-for-hire business, complete with pearl-finish business cards. He gets arrested and is eventually recruited by a drug lord, Esteban Gutierrez, to locate missing cartel money. Together with his reluctant partner, former federal agent Joe Purple, he tracks a cryptic crypto key to London. Their flight is diverted, and they are stranded in Venezuela during a violent coup. Mistakenly branded as the mercenary, “La Tormenta,” Jimmy becomes the target of rebels, endures jungle firefights and a smuggling run on a boat named The Penetrator, and embarks on a desperate Mexican border crossing. What else will he survive as the odds stack up against him?

Lou Powers excels at creating oddly endearing characters, like Jimmy, who is a “walking paradox” with loyalty to Gutierrez that is matched only by his staggering incompetence. Purple is the nicotine-addicted, exhausted voice of reason constantly dragged into the abyss by Jimmy’s stupid moves. The pacing is quick, rising from the fittingly named Turd’s Pizza in Coffee Pond to the glitz of the Iron Key Consulting in London and the ruins of Caracas. Powers wields absurdist irony and dark satire as primary literary tools that ensnare readers and keep them turning the pages. I literally laughed through the whole adventure. The iconic, world-famous photograph of Jimmy Eyebrow’s oiled-up, star-spangled physique atop Venezuelan rubble, which accidentally insinuates the United States is implicated in a coup, was particularly hilarious. The Full Package is a quirky tale about identity, loyalty, and the banality of corruption, delivered with such humor that it becomes perfect entertainment.