I'm usually a huge fan of Mr. Starr. I consider him to be the Jim Thompson of Generation X. His plots are always noir-ishly dark and you often can't tell much of a difference between his heroes and his villains.His latest book starts with a house robbery gone bad. And the rest of the book deals w...
What I don’t like is when I find the first chapter of the author’s next book added on to the end of the book I’m reading, like a free download or like junk mail. You don’t see Marcel Proust or Margaret Atwood doing that. It’s really not classy.What I do like is another tale of a guy coming apart ...
Mickey Prada's a nice kid. He works hard at a neighborhood seafood market in Brooklyn putting fish on ice. He’s got a nice girlfriend. He even delayed college a year, to help his sick dad. But Mickey’s got a problem. A customer at the fish store, Angelo Santoro, keeps asking Mickey to place bets ...
If you like noir where the protagonist starts off with a problem and descends deeper and deeper into the circles of his/her personal hell, you will be pleased with most of the novels published in the Hard Case Crime series. Sometimes, we get a bit of catharsis when a character with seeming little...
Bill Moss should by now be something big in advertising, but instead finds himself making cold calls in a New York office, working for a man he hates and living with a woman who annoys him. Sometimes life in the big city isn’t all it’s cracked up to be and it can be easy to overreact when somethi...
I expected him to steal my Twinkies or slap me on top of my head and walk away like he usually did, but he just sat there staring. Billy was the ugliest kid I’d ever seen. He had a crew cut and his face was covered with dark freckles. His nose was wide and flat and his teeth were crooked and chi...
She was looking at the copy of the Post that was lying open on the desk in front of her. After about a few seconds of looking down at the paper, chewing on gum, she pushed a button on the phone and said, ‘Brookdale, hold on,’ and then started looking at the paper again, tu...
Maybe other great things would happen to him hey, he was still young, right? but it was hard to imagine living to eighty or ninety or whatever and looking back at his life and having a better memory than the time he totally fucked Dr. Adam Bloom and his whole uppity family. Everything had been ...
It seemed like her life was getting crazier every day. She had no idea what she’d done to deserve all this crap, or what she had to do to get things back to normal. In her apartment, she popped two Advils, washed up quickly, and got into bed, waiting for her headache to subside. Finally it did. S...
Everything about her classroom fantasy that had excited her just a few minutes ago, now repulsed her. She wanted to be dead, buried or, better yet, burned. The world didn’t deserve her miserable, unfaithful body. She wanted to evaporate, combust, disappear forever. “Hey, Deb.” Deb glanced to her ...