#1: The Next Time I Die by Jason Starr

 A good-hearted but hard-luck lawyer with a spiraling personal life intervenes in a mugging, only to wake up in a better world where he has been a worse person in Jason Starr's The Next Time I Die.

Starr writes a classic unreliable narrator noir with a parallel worlds twist.  Much like a previous work, Cold Caller, things go from bad to worse to murderous as the lawyer tries to untangle himself from the mess another version of himself got him into.

Starr writes a breakneck genre-bender that doubles down on the nihilism towards the end, making it an offbeat work.  This novel came out through the Hard Case Crime line, a reliable source of reading materials for quite a few years.

I checked this one out from the New Castle-Henry County Public Library and read it quickly.

#34: Cold Caller by Jason Starr

A telemarketer in bad old 90s New York tries to climb the corporate ladder, while the pressure has his mind unraveling at the same time, in Jason Starr's Cold Caller.

Starr is a versatile thriller/noir writer who I have enjoyed over the years; I came across his initial novel for my beloved Kindle and scooped it up.

The protagonist is a classic unreliable narrator, who can't understand why a spontaneous murder is throwing a wrench in his plans.  His unplanned attack on a prostitute, and his live-in girlfriend's growing suspicions,  become increasingly inconvenient to him as well.

Cold Caller keeps spiraling into a darker and colder place until it hits bottom with a sobering, but necessary, denouement.

I read this one quickly.  Good for genre fans and fans of Starr.

#48: Fake I.D. by Jason Starr

A bouncer with a minor acting career, a middling gambling addiction, and a major sociopathic streak will do anything to buy a racehorse in Jason Starr's contemporary noir Fake I.D.

Fake I.D. is part of the highly admirable Hard Case Crime line, a mix of lost pulp novels alongside newer works in the same vein.  Jason Starr's work is a credible addition, sort of a Jim Thompson lite.  Like many Thompson protagonists, Starr's flawed narrator continues to unravel more and more, despite the banal narration, to a chilling finale.

I had never read Jason Starr but will seek out more of his work.  I thought this book was comparable to two of my favorite old-school flavored modern noirs, Scott Smith's A Simple Plan and Robert Ward's Four Kinds of Rain; good company indeed.
Had I had a single day to read this, undoubtedly I would have read it straight through. 

I nabbed this off of www.paperbackswap.com and read it quickly.