Hell's Kitchen - Softcover

Chris Niles

3.54

118 ratings by Goodreads

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0330482920 ISBN 13: 9780330482929

Publisher: Pan Books, 2001

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First printing.

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About the Author:

Chris Niles was born in New Zealand, and currently resides in New York. She is the author of a series of mysteries featuring radio reporter Sam Ridley: Spike It, Run Time, and Crossing Live.

From Publishers Weekly:

"Finding an Apartment in New York can be Murder" might have been the tagline of this entertaining, engagingly sloppy comic thriller. The plot centers around Cyrus, a trust fund dilettante turned serial killer who lures desperate New York apartment hunters into his clutches by advertising sublets in the Village Voice. Niles cuts quickly back and forth from an account of Cyrus's descent into madness to the tales of a clutch of prospective "tenants": Quinn, a handsome, perpetually blocked "Black Irish" writer; Tye Fisher, a gorgeous, charmingly criminal woman who has a more mercenary fake sublet scheme of her own; and Gus and Susie Neidermeyer, a young Midwestern couple whose fresh-out-of-college innocence dooms them to an early slaughter. With an investigative role played by Catrina Vermont, an aging TV reporter on the graveyard shift who is assigned to the story, the novel hurtles through New York's high and low society toward a clever if credulity-straining ending. Despite his murderous habits, Cyrus is the least interesting character, a rather perfunctory American Psycho retread. Niles's social satire lacks the stylish bite of that definitive yuppie-serial-killer novel, but also, thankfully, its pretentiousness. Niles writes in a jaunty, colloquial style that moves the action along nicely, but sometimes degenerates into a long string of clich‚s. She is at her best with dry, often hilariously over-the-top observations of New York life in general and the rituals of the apartment search in particular; at one point, a well-dressed young woman marches into a grotesque crime scene, stepping over bodies and ignoring the gore-spattered walls as she pulls out her checkbook to inquire, "Three months' deposit okay?" Scenes like this make the novel a fun, breezily grisly read.

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