Kiss Me, Judas - Softcover

Baer, Will Christopher

3.8

4,412 ratings by Goodreads

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1596921862 ISBN 13: 9781596921863

Publisher: MacAdam/Cage Publishing, Incorporated, 2006

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Have you ever loved someone who's mortally wounded you? Phineas Poe, disgraced cop and morphine addict, has just been released from a psych ward when he meets a beautiful woman named Jude in a hotel bar. Red dress, black hair, body like a knife. He takes her back to his room and wakes the next morning in a bathtub full of blood and ice, missing a kidney. Dragging himself from a hospital bed, Phineas discovers he wants to be with Jude like a hunger ? and he wants to find her and kill her. Falling for her is the start of a twisted love story that takes him from the snowy streets of Denver to the high plains of Texas where the boundaries between torturer and victim, killer and accomplice, become nightmarishly distorted.

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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

About the Author:

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.

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