KISS me, Judas - Softcover

Baer, Will Christopher

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0140289011 ISBN 13: 9780140289015

Publisher: Penguin, 2000

Synopsis

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.

About this title

Review:

Illegal organ appropriation has become a standard theme of the thriller (Robin Cook's Coma being the most successful example of the genre). Baer has something new to bring to the theme, however. For a start, the first-person narrative here has a brilliantly sharp and witty edge, with the black humour cunningly offsetting the grisly business of kidney theft. Starting as a salutary reminder that casual sexual encounters can have highly dangerous consequences, Baer has ex-cop Phineas Poe (shame about the name, but it's Baer's only miscalculation) becoming an unwilling kidney donor--as well as a murder suspect--after a $200 tryst with a woman who had designs on more than one of his organs. The fact that Poe is in love with the woman who left him in a bath full of ice with staples in his side makes this more than just a thriller: we're in the kind of crazed love story territory of writers like Barry Gifford, and Baer has the same outrageous gifts. There's also a strange but convincing literary structure to the book, with its short, punchy paragraphs and disturbingly distorted time sense creating a bizarre stop-start effect that nevertheless ensures the reader's total attention. --Barry Forshaw

Synopsis:

A former police officer awakens after a night of sex with a strange woman to find that one of his kidneys has been removed, an event that sends him into a druggedout underworld. A first novel. Reprint.

About this edition

• Publisher: Penguin
• Publication date: 2000
• ISBN 10: 0140289011
• ISBN 13: 9780140289015
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 288