Cold Caller by Jason Starr

207 in stock

0mm x 0mm x 0mm

Pages: 218

Product Description
If Jim Thompson had gotten an MBA, he might have written Cold Caller, a ravingly readable story of a downwardly mobile yuppie wholl just kill to get ahead. Once a rising VP at a topflight ad agency, Bill Moss now works as a cold caller at a telemarketing firm in the Times Square area. Hes got a bad case of the urban blues, and when a pink slip rather than a promotion comes through, Bill snaps....Now hes got a dead supervisor on his hands and problems no career counselor can help him with. Jason Starr has retooled the James M. Cain novel of cynical suspense and murder for the fiber-optic age.
Review
In the two years since he got fired from his job as vice president at a New York ad agency, Bill Moss has made ends meet by a part-time telemarketing job for the grandly named American Communications Association. By day he forces himself to excel at the job he hates doing for penny-ante bosses (bureaucrats who could have stepped from the pages of Dilbert) whom he hates even more; each night he goes home to his girlfriend Julie, who wishes he would convert to Judaism; when their sex life goes into hibernation, Bill fantasizes about prostitutes. Most of the time, his bottled rage seems like nothing more than the psychopathology of everyday life, but a spectacularly unguarded remark at a dinner with two of Julies stuffy college friends makes it obvious just how explosively he can act out. In fact, Bill is a disaster waiting to happen; its only a matter of time before his murderous temper, whose eruptions he describes with disarming matter-of-factness, leads him to real murder. (Wait till you see who he kills.) The act leads him to a series of halfhearted attempts at concealment, and, inevitably, to a further spiral of violence before the postman rings twice in the highly appropriate ending. Starrs unsettlingly funny debut, running as hot and cold as Bills moods, is just the thing for fans who miss the acid noir that Jim Thompson dispensed in The Grifters. -- Copyright -¬1998, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved. --
From Kirkus Reviews
About the Author
JASON STARR is the author of 11 crime novels, including Anthony Award winner Twisted City and Barry Award winner Tough Luck. His other books are: Cold Caller, Nothing Personal, Fake ID, Hard Feelings, Lights Out, and his latest novel now available from St. Martins Press: The Follower. He also co-written three novels with Ken Bruen for Hard Case Crime: Bust, Slide, and the Max. His books are published in nine languages and he lives in NYC.