A W.W. Norton Paperback Original
Editions available: U.S., U.K., German, French, Italian, Spanish, Japanese, Polish (forthcoming)
Film rights: Smoking Gun Productions
Cold Caller is a featured text in the critical book "20th Century Crime Fiction" by Lee Horsley, published in the U.S. and U.K. by Oxford University Press.
Cold Caller has been chosen for a series of the best 50 crime novels of the past 60 years, and will be published in a new hardcover edition in Germany in August, 2006.
If Jim Thompson had gotten an MBA, he might have written Cold Caller, a ravingly readable story of a downwardly mobile yuppie who'll just kill to get ahead. Once a rising VP at a topflight ad agency, Bill Moss now works as a "cold caller" at a telemarketing firm in the Times Square area. He's got a bad case of the urban blues, and when a pink slip rather than a promotion comes through, Bill snaps....Now he's got a dead supervisor on his hands and problems no career counselor can help him with....
KIRKUS REVIEWS: "Just the thing for fans who miss the acid noir that Jim Thompson
dispensed in The Grifters."
THE BALTIMORE SUN: "A literary tour de force...One cheers for the salvation of Bill
Moss, a lying but likable sociopath, cast in a satire where killing to get ahead in a
smarmy office doesn't seem like such a bad idea. The conclusion is inspired."
KIRKUS REVIEWS: "Starr's unsettlingly funny debut...is just the thing for fans who
miss the acid noir that Jim Thompson dispensed in 'The Grifters"
DETOUR: "A sick, slick dissection of office politics and nine-to-five murder....Cold
Caller recalls the bloody pulp fiction of Jim Thompson and James M. Cain, devilishly
updated for the "work is hell" '90s."
PUBLISHER'S WEEKLY: "A dead-end soul in the grand tradition of James Cain...Starr
has an instinct for outlining the kind of life that Black Mask readers gobbled up in the
1930s-the life of extinguished opportunity and of petty troubles that accumulate,
somehow, into major crimes. The one welcome difference; he draws Bill without the
sentimental lyricism that occasionally plagued even the most hard-boiled writers."
THE LONDON TIMES: "A thriller which has more twists and turns than an ice-dancing
championship and which proves just as chilling....Well crafted and very scary."
THE DAILY TELEGRAPH: "At the cutting edge of the revival of classic American noir
fiction."
THE LONDON GUARDIAN :"Cool, deadpan, a rollercoaster ride to hell."
THE LITERARY REVIEW: "Tough, composed, and about as noir as you can go."
Available as a PDF.
Available in text format.
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