Kiss Me Judas [Paperback]

In his extremely dark but very effective first thriller, former cabdriver and homeless counselor Will Christopher Baer takes that old urban legend of the man who wakes up in a hotel bathtub full of ice to discover that somebody has removed one of his kidneys and whips it up into a modernized Edgar Allan Poe nightmare. Baer's hero is in fact called Phineas Poe--an ex-cop who spent six years digging up dirt in and on the Denver P.D.'s Internal Affairs Division. On his first night out after a nervous breakdown and a six-month stay in a psychiatric hospital, Poe is picked up by a prostitute named Jude who drugs his drink and deftly removes his kidney.

Poe heads for the Witch's Teat, a sex shop where his friend Crumb works. "Crumb isn't really a doctor. He does cheap abortions and gunshot wounds and even dental work for the mad and desperate," Baer writes in deceptively plain present-tense prose, which quickly mesmerizes like electronic music. "Crumb reads a lot. He has a closet full of old surgical textbooks and a lot of stolen equipment. And he doesn't try to fake you. If you come to him with a ruptured bowel or a crushed spine, he gives you a cup of tea and sends you to the hospital." Poe learns that his kidney has been replaced by a bag of heroin--which could kill him if it dissolves. Intent on retrieving his stolen organ, he traces Jude to a bowling alley called the Inferno. Strangely enough, with Jude he reluctantly discovers the chance of love and family that he thought was gone forever when his wife died. In lesser hands, this flash of light in a roomful of noir could easily have spoiled everything. But Baer makes it all seem as natural as whistling in the dark. --Dick Adler --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Although there are obvious biblical allusions in Baer's stylized debut, this noir tale takes no clearly biblical route. The characters' names promise a governing metaphor: there's Jude, an alluring sociopath; Eve, a black-tongued lesbian; Rose White, a virginal med student; and a bowling alley called the Inferno. There's also a beautiful young man afflicted since birth with HIV (born to die) who begs for a kiss before his demise. Even the title foreshadows a betrayal of biblical proportions. Yet this unrelentingly dark story, set in Colorado and Texas, features mostly underworld characters and a surreal sense of reality. Narrator Phineas Poe, a former investigator for the internal affairs division of Denver's police department, offers only a hallucinatory account that is both compelling and confusing. Just released from a psychiatric hospital, he meets Jude, has sex and awakens in a tub full of ice. He discovers that she's cut into him and stolen one of his kidneys. Despite his weakened state, he tracks her down. On his way, he encounters the Blister, a corrupt cop who reveals that Jude replaced his kidney with a bag of heroin and is using him to smuggle dope. Should the bag dissolve, Poe will die. Should he remove it, he might find a bomb. On the other hand, Jude may be exploiting him as a live carrier of his other kidney for efficient delivery to the man with the money. Poe definitely has problems, not the least of which is the haunting memory of his wife's wretched death. His dilemma only worsens when he joins Jude in her nefarious career, falls in love with her and anticipates her betrayal. Yet she's not what she seems and where they ultimately end up provides this intriguing tale with a quirky, redemptive glow. Editor, Courtney Hodell; agent; Daniel Mandel. Author tour.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Not for the faint of heart, Kiss Me, Judas starts off bloody and zooms nonstop to a gripping climax. Baer's minimalist debut novel is reminiscent of a Quentin Tarantino film?dark, graphic, and twisted?but without the quirky humor. Phineas Poe, an ex-Internal Affairs cop, walks straight out of a mental hospital into his worst nightmare: after drinks with a mysterious woman, he comes to in a bloody, ice-filled hotel bathtub?missing a kidney. "If you want to live, call 911," reads the note left with him. Poe breaks out of the hospital in search of Jude, his seductress, unsure of whether he will kill her or have sex with her and then kill her. Flashbacks and hallucinations, drug-induced and otherwise, hint that Poe has more to deal with than organ-stealing vamps: namely, the bizarre circumstances of his wife's death. A paranoid thriller; for public libraries.?Christine Perkins, Jackson Cty Lib. Svcs., Medford, OR
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Baer's first novel is an unending nightmare of drugs, sex, and violence, in which neither the main character nor, probably, the reader is able to tell the difference between what's real and what's hallucinatory. Phineas Poe, formerly of the Internal Affairs Division of the Denver Police Department and recently released psychiatric patient, picks up a young woman in a bar one night and wakes up the next morning in a hotel room bathtub that's filled with ice, holding a slip of paper that reads "If you want to live, call 911." His attempts to track down the woman from the bar and understand what's happening, as well as his ability to remember his past, are made more difficult by the massive quantity of drugs he's ingesting and injecting. As Poe vainly tries to decide whom to trust, he makes his way through an underworld of illicit organ harvests, feuding families, and deadly games. Although stylish, edgy, and with the right director, a wonderful movie in waiting, this novel is not for the faint of heart or weak of stomach. Nancy Pearl --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Stylistically superb debut that reinvents the thriller, dots every noir, and slashes every t, each note pitch-perfect as a presto from hell. After six years with Denver's Internal Affairs Division as a rat sniffing about the IAD itself, Phineas Poe has a nervous breakdown, his wife dies (leukemia? suicide? murder?), he turns himself in at a psychiatric hospital, and when he gets out six months later, he goes to a bar, picks up a prostitute - or, rather, Jude picks him up, and slips some horse tranquilizer into his Tequila Sunrise. He awakens half-frozen under reddish ice in the bathtub, a telephone by the tub and a note in his fingers saying ``if you want to live call 911.'' When the emergency team lifts him out of the tub, Poe finds that Jude has performed some rough surgery on him, i.e., stolen his left kidney and stapled him back up. All this is told with great panache and subzero cool. Surprisingly, scene follows scene with no dimming of invention (Poe's jolted, for example, to learn that Jude also left a large deposit of raw heroin in his lower intestine before closing up his body). Will he be surgically manipulated again later? A killer puts a gun to Poe's head, offering him $100,000 to murder Jude and retrieve the kidney for the killer's dying brother. But Poe's so filled with liquid Valium and morphine that one can't tell whether he's tripping, as the dead walk and talk and long scenes waver in graphic dreams. Baer will almost certainly write better books than this, but probably not with such youthful verve, bare nerve-ends, or frigidly droll, dead-on metaphors. May his second be just as trim, while taking a bigger bite out of darkness and the big sleep. (Author tour) -- Copyright ©1998, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Will Christopher Baer's hypnotic debut novel merges the best of the noir tradition with a scalpel-sharp modern sensibility. When ex-cop Phineas Poe is released from a six-month stay in a Denver psychiatric hospital, he meets a savage and unsentimental woman named Jude. After a drunken night with her, Phineas awakens in a bathtub packed with ice, holding a soggy note that reads "if you want to live, call 911." Jude has taken one of his kidneys. This phantasmagoric tale follows Poe as he pursues, and falls for, the mysterious Jude and is plunged into an edgy, drug-blurred underworld inhabited by a gleeful cast of sinister characters. Fast, furious, and glittering with a razor-sharp wit, this is a startling novel of modern noir.

Will Christopher Baer was born in 1966 in Mississippi and grew up in Memphis, Tennessee. He has won fiction prizes from Story Magazine and has published work in Bomb and Nerve. He lives in California.