From Publishers Weekly
After fumbling a casual pickup in a bar, financial journalist David Miller realizes his wallet has been lifted, and he quickly descends into Manhattan's underbelly in Starr's sinister black comedy. Life has been rough lately: deeply depressed after the death of his beloved sister, David lost his job with the
Wall Street Journal. He hates his new job and despises his younger live-in girlfriend, who seems more and more psychotic every day. But that was yesterday—today he's negotiating in a sweltering closed-in room in an Alphabet City tenement with a junkie hooker who claims she "found" his wallet. David knows she must be in on the sting, and the wallet isn't that important except for his favorite picture of his sister he keeps in it. But from facing mere extortion, it takes only a few hours for the reporter to find himself vertiginously plunged into murder and blackmail. Starr (
Tough Luck), an heir of the bleakly noir mantle of Jim Thompson, is a master at portraying New York as a city of the damned. In David he gives his ever-expanding cult readership a normal guy, calmly accepting a ticket to hell, where an ending worthy of Charles Willeford at his most absurd awaits him.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
From Booklist
David Miller is in a funk. He recently slumped down the journalistic food chain from the
Wall Street Journal to a finance rag called
Manhattan Business. The reason for Miller's fall: his... obsession with his sister only increased after she died of cancer. In addition, the young reporter lost his friends after rejecting their prescient assessment of his girlfriend as "psychotic"--and she's repaid his loyalty by partying the nights away with another man. So when Miller's lost wallet leads to a shakedown by a junkie hooker, he figures it's just another bad episode in the bleak sitcom of his life. But then the hooker's jealous boyfriend dies, potentially putting Miller on the hook for a murder rap. Flames licking at his heels, Miller grimly soldiers through a squalid story that takes on his flattened affect as it navigates the usual sordid twists and dares readers to give a damn. It's the literary equivalent of a Big Mac or Snickers bar: satisfying to devour but immediately forgotten--save for a familiar pang of guilt about straying from healthier fare.
Frank SennettCopyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
