Starr, Jason Books

Bust (Hard Case Crime)

Ken Bruen, Jason Starr

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 18 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

Gritty book full of despicable characters! Exactly what it should be... 4 out of 5 stars.
3 of 3 people found this review helpful.

BUST is a never-before-published book in the Hard Case Crime series. Hard Case Crime books contains classic crime novels as well as new thrillers. One thing all these stories have in common (I've read six of them) is that none of the characters are good people. Bust takes that to the extreme. Max Fisher is having an affair with Angela. Max hates his wife and hires someone Angela knows to kill his wife. Angela lives with Dillon and is only after Max for his money. Bobby is a wheelchair bound criminal blackmailing Max. And that is just the tip of the iceberg. Each character commits a heinous act after heinous act, each plot turn worse than the one before, each character action is usually a crime to cover up a previous crime. None of the characters are sympathetic. All of them are clueless. And that is why I recommend this violent, gritty novel. It fits right in with the genre. If you like Hard Case Crime books, then you must read this one. If you are new to the series, I suggest checking out a classic to get familiar with what to expect. There is nothing uplifting in BUST, but that doesn't mean you still can't enjoy the awful selfishness of the evil characters.

Slide

Ken Bruen, Jason Starr

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 9 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

A madcap ride with a one of the world' great sleezeballs, a serial killer, and a real operator 5 out of 5 stars.
1 of 1 people found this review helpful.

Following up where Bust leaves off, Slide is a rollicking good time ride with two of the main protagonists from the first book; Max Fisher, a hustler so driven he hustles himself first, and Angela Petrakos, a VERY calculating accomplice. They are joined by a plethora for characters who are well writ and capture the zeitgeist of a culture shot through with drugs, absolute worship of money, and the worst excesses of popular culture.

There are so many great lines in this book. Bruen has always been good at the throwaway gem, but Starr seems to have kicked him up to a whole new level. Dozens of times in the book Max starts to get a clue that maybe he isn't quite as a) appealing to women, b) controlled in his use of drugs, or c) quite the criminal mastermind he conceives himself to be. But then with a wonderful turn of phrase he dismissed any self doubt and jumps back in on his own Teflon chuted sleigh ride to hell. Only George Pelecanos does these wry asides as well, although Starr/Breun's drip with sarcasm as opposed to the irony of Pelecanos. But then, the authors are on very different missions with their works.

Of course, there has to be another protagonist and Starr and Bruen introduced Slide, a captivating, totally amoral psychopath who has delusional problems of his own.

The plot that ensues is just this side of far fetched, just this side of madcap, and a heck of a lot of fun. I read this book on a 6 hour flight from Newark to San Francisco, and laughed for the whole three hours it took to read.

So it is a lot of fun, but if you step back and think about it, it takes damn good writers to publish something this tightly plotted, this economical with words, and this ironic. Not only a great read, but also a very well constructed work.

If you read this, you must read Bust first, or you will miss a lot of the plot.

Damn Near Dead: An Anthology of Geezer Noir

Duane Swierczynski, Laura Lippman, Jason Starr, Jeff Abbott, Colin Cotterill, Reed Farrel Coleman, Victor Gischler, Mark Billingham, Steve Brewer, Ken Bruen

Amazon Price: $12.24 List Price: $18.00 Usually ships in 24 hours By: Busted Flush Press Amazon Marketplace: 34 new & used starting at $6.37

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 7 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

Black Diamonds 5 out of 5 stars.
3 of 4 people found this review helpful.

What a terrific anthology - kudo's to editor/author Duane Swierczynski for compiling this collection of short stories that define noir - hardboiled gems written with cracked asphalt and broken beer bottles; brown paper bags with cold cash or cheap whiskey or untraceable .38s. I found many of my favorite authors here - Bruen, Burton, Cotterill, Stella, Brewer, Gischler, Doolittle, and of course Swierczynski, but also some vets and new faces I haven't discovered, but will be reading soon.

While it's hard to award medals in such a rarefied crowd, Ken Bruen's typically dark, bleak and depressing "Old Gun" will fray the edges of your conscious for weeks to come. Milton T. Burton's honey-smooth prose flows easily from a master story teller in "Encore", in neat contrast to Bruen's lean and jagged writing, even though both carry unshakable images of despair without redemption. Victor Gischler's "Duffers of the Apocalypse" is black humor as clever as it is dark, and Robert Ward's macabre "The Deadsters" could as easily show up in a collection of top notch horror. Colin Cotterill's wily Laotian Dr. Siri Paiboun, protagonist of four outstanding Cotterill novels, makes an appearance in author's typically light, well crafted "Has Anyone Seen Mrs. Lightswitch", and Charlie Stella hones his Brooklyn street smart chops with "Geezer Tricks", a story of the phone sex industry as moving as it is cynically funny. And while most noir crime fiction is about tough guys, Swierczynski's mix is liberally and effectively laced with savvy and calculating old broads - notably Laura Lipman's "Femme Fatale", "Policy" by Megan Abbot, Stuart MacBride's "Daphne McAndrews and the Smack-Head Junkies", and the Hitchcockian "Pros and Cons" by Donna Moore. Being noir, irony takes center stage, and none do it better than Swierczynski's own "Say Goodnight to the Bad Guy", the venerable Bill Crider's "Cranked", Steve Brewer's "Payoff", and Sean Doolittle's "The Necklace", a crafty and well told tale of age and wisdom trumping youth an inexperience which, if pressed, may be the best of this elite bunch.

So take it from a bona fide geezer - this is crime fiction in it's finest form - an unbeatable bargain of over two-dozen hard hitting dramas of crime, passion, and poignancy from a gang that may be damn near dead, but are certainly far from over the hill.

Editorial Review:

Hard-boiled story collection, featuring original ''geezer noir'' tales by Jeff Abbott, Megan Abbott, Charles Ardai, Ray Banks, Mark Billingham, Steve Brewer, Ken Bruen, Milton Burton, Reed Farrel Coleman, Colin Cotterill, Bill Crider, Sean Doolittle, Victor Gischler, Allan Guthrie, John Harvey, Simon Kernick, Laura Lippman, Stuart MacBride, Donna Moore, Zoë Sharp, Jenny Siler, Jason Starr, Charlie Stella, Duane Swierczynski, Robert Ward, Sarah Weinman and Dave White.

Cold Caller (Norton Paperback)

Jason Starr

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 13 Average rating: 3.5 of 5

If Jim Thompson were a Yuppie... 4 out of 5 stars.
5 of 5 people found this review helpful.

If Jim Thompson were a Yuppie, he might have written this book.

Bill Moss is a failed advertising exec living in Manhattan. Restarting his career as a telemarketer (for a lot less money), he and his co-workers are routinely humiliated by a petty and racist supervisor. But things get more tolerable for Moss when a chance lie he tells to the company's President results in a surprise promotion. Then he gathers enough courage to live out his long-time fantasy of an encounter with a 'lady of the evening'. Feeling guilty afterwards, Moss batters the woman.

Then, when his boss threatens to fire him over an unrelated manner, Moss snaps. Now he's got a dead body in his office and a bunch of violent p imps chasing him. And things go downhill from there.

_Cold Caller_ is a seductively easy read that has several exquisite plot points. If you liked Thompson's _The Killer Inside Me_, I can almost guarantee you'll think as I do about _Cold Caller_: it's deliciously good.

Editorial Review:

A ravingly readable tale of a downwardly mobile yuppie who'll just kill to get ahead. Think Jim Thompson with an MBA . . . Once Bill Moss was a rising VP at a topflight ad agency, but now he works as a "cold caller" at a telemarketing firm in the Times Square area. He's got a bad case of the urban blues. Still, he's good at his work and (he thinks) about to be promoted, when out of the blue he's fired. So Bill snaps . . . and the next thing he knows he has a dead supervisor on his hands and problems no career counselor can help him with. In Cold Caller Jason Starr retools the James M. Cain novel of cynical suspense and murder for the fiber-optic age.

Nothing Personal

Jason Starr

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 11 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

With his debut novel, Cold Caller, Jason Starr emerged on the mystery scene as heir to the bleakly cynical Jim Thompson (The Grifters) and James M. Cain (Double Indemnity, The Postman Always Rings Twice). His follow-up effort, Nothing Personal, confirms Starr's position at the cutting edge of the revival of classic American noir, tracing in sharp relief lives of extinguished opportunity and of petty troubles that accumulate, somehow, into major crimes.

Thus it is that hapless Joey DePino, saddled with an incurable gambler's optimism--but even worse gambler's luck--finds himself threatened with the deadly wrath of irate and unpaid bookies. What to do? Drift into an inept plan to kidnap Jessica Sussman, that's what. Joey's wife Maureen and Jessica's mother Leslie were childhood friends, and Joey has endured enough anemic evenings at the Sussman's Upper East Side apartment in New York to feel entitled to a little ransom retribution. Too bad for him that David Sussman, Jessica's father, is currently trying to end an affair with a psychopathic coworker. Hell hath no fury, as everybody knows, and the result is a tangled mess of motive, mistaken identity, and murder. The lives of the Sussmans and the DePinos--so different on their (respectively) gilt-edged and tattered surfaces--form parallel strands intertwining and accelerating toward a dark nadir.

As a genre, noir is an acquired taste: be warned that Starr tends to forsake character development and verisimilitude for an irony outlined in exceedingly broad strokes. You may find yourself getting heartily sick of both the Sussmans and the DePinos--but take comfort in the fact that Starr himself has an equally low opinion of his characters, and is only too ready to offer them up, in the finale, as grist for a bitingly sharp dinner-party mill. --Kelly Flynn

Fake ID

Jason Starr

Amazon Price: $14.45 List Price: $14.45 Not yet published By: No Exit Press

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 2 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Another Great Jason Starr Novel 5 out of 5 stars.
3 of 3 people found this review helpful.

This is a great novel. Probably one of Jason Starr's best. It's got the feel of a Charles Willeford novel or . . . Jim Thompson, David Goodis or Harry Whittington. If you like any of those novelists, you'll love this one. It reminded me a lot of Willeford's High Priest of California and The Woman Chaser. The character of Tommy Russo will remind you of Russell Haxby and Richard Hudson. It was hard to put this book down.

Great in general but Starr's done better 4 out of 5 stars.
1 of 1 people found this review helpful.

This is a hard book to find but I am a major, though recent, fan of Jason Starr's, so I hunted it down. After reading it I wanted to post a review to let you know that if you can only find it for a ton of cash (I saw many sellers asking $75 for it!), don't buy it. Wait for it to get re-released. While I would think $75 for one of Starr's other books, like maybe Hard Feelings or Twisted City, would be money well spent (umm...I hope his publishers aren't reading this), I don't think you'll be happy you spent that on this one. It's a good read but not up to par with the rest of Starr's novels, in my opinion.

The book has all the classic Starr elements (first person narrative of guy you like in the beginning but slowly come to realize may have a few...problems), it lacks some of the punch of his later books. In particular I noticed that he didn't do as good a job making this character interesting or sympathetic despite his "bad guy" status as he does in his other books. Also, the ending is more *mild spoiler alert* traditional than the fantastic endings he employs in almost every one of his other books.

Overall, this is a very good book. The guy writes like gangbusters and reading his books is never anything less than fun. But, his later novels are much better than this one, which is probably why it's the only one not readily available. So, my advice is, if you can get your hands on it for cheap, go for it. If not, wait for the reprint and then enjoy it at as a great read at retail price.

Hard Feelings: A Novel

Jason Starr

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 11 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

Penzler Pick, March 2002: Perverse as she was, I think Patricia Highsmith would approve. With his fourth novel, Jason Starr stakes his claim on the claustrophobic territory that she carved out so brilliantly for the four decades of her writing career. And the people at Vintage/Black Lizard, the publishers of Hard Feelings as their first-ever original paperback--who have a number of Highsmith titles on their classic-noir list--know it. They are also invoking the name of another darkly unsettling and equally legendary American writer. The editor-in-chief of Black Lizard, Edward Kastenmeier, says, "Reading Hard Feelings was like the first time I read The Killer Inside Me by Jim Thompson: eerie, disturbing and blackly comic."

Richie Segal, the increasingly strung-out narrator of Hard Feelings, is a yuppie New Yorker with a co-op in an East Side high-rise, an executive wife who's just received a promotion, and credit card bills to the tune of $20,000. He's failing at his job--selling computer networks to midsized companies--and has just seen on the street, out of the blue, a man who was his neighbor when they were teenagers. There's something painful about this fellow, Michael Rudnick, now a successful lawyer, that Richie has suppressed for more than two decades. And now that he has begun to remember it, the awful unfairness of their shared shadow history begins to pervade his life, haunting his waking hours... and his dreams.

Hard Feelings does a nearly faultless job of building tension and following Richie's descent into a world that resembles the one in which he has previously lived, in the same way a grimace resembles a grin. Fans of Donald E. Westlake's The Ax and Scott Phillips's The Ice Harvest will love it. It may also be the first "take-out" noir novel, since in typical New York fashion, Richie and Paula, his wife, possess a stack of menus rather than a batterie de cuisine. You can almost taste the chicken chow fun, the boxed pizza, the sushi-to-go, and other bicycled-over delicacies.

The ending may be a too-convenient cutting away from even the slightest glimpse of a crucial moment in Richie's final deterioration. Others may disagree. But, ultimately, this minor lapse doesn't keep it from being a terrific--and terrifying--book. --Otto Penzler

The Bully

Jason Starr

Amazon Price: $0.49 List Price: $0.49 Available for download now By: Amazon

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 2 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

School Days - When Bullies Are Kings 5 out of 5 stars.
2 of 2 people found this review helpful.

Were you ever bullied as a kid? This story will send you back to those days in a flash. If the principal can't do anything to protect you, and your parents won't, then you are totally at the mercy of the bully. But maybe you're better off without any help. Some people's help just makes matters worse.

Great story, Jason! Really enjoyed it!

The Bully film coming soon!! 5 out of 5 stars.
0 of 0 people found this review helpful.

[...]
The Bully, based on the short story by Jason Starr, is being made into a short film by Australian production company, Smoking Gun Productions. Adapted by director, Shane McNeil, and to be produced by Kristian Moliere (Boxing Day) The Bully is a suburban noir about an overweight 14 year-old boy who is the victim of schoolyard bullying. When he turns to his father for advice, things go from bad to worse...

"What initially attracted us to The Bully was that it had a lean, spare narrative, was tightly plotted with moments of real suspense and shock and that it centred upon a complex and complicated protagonist--all of which I felt would form a strong foundation for cinematic adaptation, " said Shane McNeil.

The Bully was recently selected for production funding by the South Australian Film Corporation under their Short Film Production initiative. The film will be shot in late 2008 for release in early 2009. Rising Sun Pictures (who have done VFX for Harry Potter, Batman Begins, Superman Returns, Lord of the Rings, etc) have co-partnered with Smoking Gun Productions on post production.

Smoking Gun Productions have also optioned Jason Starr's first novel, Cold Caller, which Jason is currently adapting. Kristian said, "We are very excited to be continuing our collaboration with Jason and look forward to taking our first step into production with The Bully."

Editorial Review:

I love writing short stories that have lots of twists and turns, and that don't turn out the way readers expect, and I think “The Bully” is one of my best examples of this. I particularly enjoyed writing the character of Jonathon's father, who would be a very strong candidate for the Worst Dad of the Year award. While “The Bully” has plenty of dark, twisted humor, ultimately I think it's one of the saddest stories I've ever written. I'd love to hear what readers think of it (through my website)!

Lights Out (St. Martin's Minotaur Mysteries)

Jason Starr

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 10 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

“Lights Out is a fast, furious page-turner. This book is a huge treat.”---Jeffery Deaver, author of The Cold Moon: A Lincoln Rhyme Novel

From Barry and Anthony Award-winning author Jason Starr comes a story of two friends divided by chance and reunited during a long Brooklyn weekend that will change both of their lives forever. Ryan Rossetti and Jake Thomas were the two Major League-bound rivals on their high school baseball team, heading straight into history as the first two of Canarsie’s favorite sons to make it out and make it big. Until Ryan hurt his pitching arm and landed a ten-dollar-an-hour life as a house painter. Lucky Jake made it all the way, and he and his ten-million-dollar signing bonus are heading back for a publicity-motivated homecoming weekend that has all of Brooklyn waiting to explode in celebration.

But he’s got a nasty surprise in store: Ryan is involved in an intense, addictive relationship with Jake’s fiancée Christina, who now faces a choice between love in a Brooklyn tenement or a heartless marriage on Easy Street. Neither man, nor the woman who now stands between them, has any idea what’s about to play out in the streets they once all called home. Lights Out is vintage Jason Starr, a razor-sharp crime novel that brilliantly combines biting social satire, explosive suspense, and honest, revealing human drama.

Twisted City

Jason Starr

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Total reviews: 9 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

Pretty Good, but... 3 out of 5 stars.
3 of 4 people found this review helpful.

Jason' Starr's writing is taunt and compelling and he weaves a twisted little plot well enough to keep me reading. The only real let-down for me is that this book seems to "stop" rather than end. After working his way through all of the twisted turns, Starr brings everything to an abrupt and unsatisfying halt. If the ending was supposed to be a surprise, it wasn't. An average reader will figure out (or at least strongly suspect) David's past history from the get-go. "Twisted City" is a good noir tale, but ultimately unsatisfying.

Editorial Review:

From the acclaimed noir novelist Jason Starr comes this savage portrait of a misanthropic man stuck in a New York nightmare. Written in caustic, streamlined prose, Twisted City is a chilling depiction of how quickly one's life can take a turn for the worst.

Times are tough for David Miller, a journalist for a second-rate financial magazine who hates his boss, is tired of supporting his girlfriend's partying lifestyle, and recently lost his sister to cancer. But things are about to get much worse. When he loses his wallet in a midtown bar, he is launched into a world where he finds himself being blackmailed by junkies, lying to his friends and family, and stumbling into a crime that may cost him his life.