Jane Charlotte is a serial killer and a saint. She’s a secret agent and a pedophile. She’s a liar, and a really good storyteller. Jane Charlotte is holding a bright orange gun ready to shoot silent, heart-attack-causing-bullets into the next bad monkey that walks by.

Matt Ruff’s new novel, Bad Monkeys, is a riveting 230 pages describing the life of 40-something failure Jane Charlotte. Ruff’s science-fiction/thriller/trade novel is not only a rousing thriller but also uses lovable Jane Charlotte to take the reader through a triple-edged ruse to its jaw-dropping resolution.

The novel begins in an entirely white room where Jane Charlotte is speaking to a doctor after being arrested for murder. Her witty, ostentatious personality is Ruff’s first hook. She tells her doctor that she works for a secret corporation whose sole purpose is to kill evil people.

At first, the story sounds more like a remake of Wanted, where Angelina Jolie plays a washed up, forty-year-old schizophrenic, but the plot quickly thickens and becomes more enticing. Charlotte begins to tell the doctor her life story, starting from when she was 13-years-old.

At times, Ruff’s play-by-play style reads more like a screenplay than a novel, but he adds round characters, deliberate but not too thick symbolism, and plot twists to keep any expressive, or pretentious, English student aesthetically fulfilled.

As Jane’s life story proceeds, she swindles her readers into loving her every thought, and craving her unobstructed insanity. Ruff employs guns that shoot natural-cause deaths, drug-induced fight scenes that defy the boundaries of science, and mentally sick serial killers. Through the bond between a brother and sister, Ruff proves that good and evil are divided by a very, very thin line.

It’s Matrix meets Harry Potter meets Brave New World, and a real quick read for a busy ASU student.

Reach the reporter at kelsey.havens@asu.edu.