Kiss Me, Judas (Mint First Edition)

Will Christopher Baer

ISBN 10: 0670881759 / ISBN 13: 9780670881758

Published by Viking, New York,, 1998

About this Item

New York, Viking, 1998, First Edition. First printing. Very fine in a very fine jacket. A perfect unread copy. Purchased new and unread, without defect, never opened. You cannot find a better copy. Seller Inventory # 9008

Bibliographic Details

Title: Kiss Me, Judas (Mint First Edition)

Publisher: Viking, New York,

Publication Date: 1998

Binding: Hardcover

Condition: New

Dust Jacket Condition: New

Edition: 1st Edition

About this title

Synopsis:

“Don’t worry,” a voice whispers. “You really only need one.”
 
Phineas Poe, disgraced cop turned psychiatric case, turned murder suspect, turned reluctant kidney donor, gives $200 to a beautiful woman in a red dress, a scar at the edge of her mouth and a body like a knife. He then wakes up in a bath of melting ice, blood on his fingers and staples in his sides. Now she haunts his dreams and his days. She’s got his kidney on ice and her teeth in his heart.
 
Finding her means throwing himself into a drug-blurred underworld. Falling in love with her means fighting to avoid becoming her accomplice as well as her victim.
 
Fast, corrosive wit, glittering, razor-sharp images, a cast of comic and sinister characters, part love story, part mystery, part hallucination, Kiss Me, Judas is a startling novel of modern noir.
 
“A surreal nightmare full of the hard-boiled nourish spirit of Raymond Chandler.” – San Francisco Chronicle

Review:

In his extremely dark but very effective first thriller, former cabdriver and homeless counselor Will Christopher Baer takes that old urban legend of the man who wakes up in a hotel bathtub full of ice to discover that somebody has removed one of his kidneys and whips it up into a modernized Edgar Allan Poe nightmare. Baer's hero is in fact called Phineas Poe--an ex-cop who spent six years digging up dirt in and on the Denver P.D.'s Internal Affairs Division. On his first night out after a nervous breakdown and a six-month stay in a psychiatric hospital, Poe is picked up by a prostitute named Jude who drugs his drink and deftly removes his kidney.

Poe heads for the Witch's Teat, a sex shop where his friend Crumb works. "Crumb isn't really a doctor. He does cheap abortions and gunshot wounds and even dental work for the mad and desperate," Baer writes in deceptively plain present-tense prose, which quickly mesmerizes like electronic music. "Crumb reads a lot. He has a closet full of old surgical textbooks and a lot of stolen equipment. And he doesn't try to fake you. If you come to him with a ruptured bowel or a crushed spine, he gives you a cup of tea and sends you to the hospital." Poe learns that his kidney has been replaced by a bag of heroin--which could kill him if it dissolves. Intent on retrieving his stolen organ, he traces Jude to a bowling alley called the Inferno. Strangely enough, with Jude he reluctantly discovers the chance of love and family that he thought was gone forever when his wife died. In lesser hands, this flash of light in a roomful of noir could easily have spoiled everything. But Baer makes it all seem as natural as whistling in the dark. --Dick Adler