Mickey Prada's a nice kid. He works in a neighborhood seafood market in Brooklyn putting fish on ice. He’s got a nice girlfriend. He even delayed college a year, to help his sick dad. But Mickey’s got a problem. A customer at the fish store, Angelo Santoro, keeps asking Mickey to place bets for him and Angelo keeps losing. As Angelo gets further in the hole, his bad luck is turning out to be Mickey’s too.

Now Mickey’s got his bookie after him and Angelo’s showing him the butt of his pistol rather than paying him back. So when his best friend, Chris, asks Mickey to join him on a can’t-lose caper, Mickey decides to go along. But, surefire schemes often have a way of backfiring, and this one is sending Mickey into an uncharted part of Brooklyn, where fish like Chris and Mickey have trouble just staying alive.

BOOKLIST: "Starr has total control of his plot, and he's so relentlessly clever that poor Mickey's life becomes a mesmerizing exercise in personal decline in which every piece smartly falls into place. An unsettling read, but hard to put down."

PUBLISHER'S WEEKLY: Starr (Cold Caller; Hard Feelings) delivers a wild ride through a mob-saturated Italian-American community in 1980s New York, keeping the surprises coming up to the last sentence...The neighborhoods and OTB parlors and other fixtures of the local scene are captured perfectly, and the manic back-and-forth between Mickey and his friends is hilarious. Starr moves deftly through his milieu, twisting expectations and producing a grim comedy, something that may surprise--but shouldn't disappoint those who know him for his earlier, more straightforward Jim Thompson-style lowlife crime novels."

NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW: "Like the noir genre masters he obviously admires, Jason Starr seems to have given a lot of thought to those tricky existential notions of fate and free will. Mickey Prada, the flawed hero who jumps to life in TOUGH LUCK (Vintage Crime/ Black Lizard, paper, $12), has no desire to embark on a life of crime. This likable Brooklyn teenager, who works in a fish market on Flatbush Avenue while caring for a father with Alzheimer's, just wants to save enough money to go to Baruch College next semester. And maybe meet a nice girl who won't make fun of his big nose. But the kid is sweeter than any kid in his situation should be, and people take advantage. The customer who leans on Mickey to cover his gambling debts is mean and menacing, but no different from the guys on Mickey's bowling team who drag him into a burglary that escalates into a double murder. Mickey is on the brink of perdition before he gets a break from Starr, a hard-knuckled writer who doesn't exactly resolve the free will question but who, having drawn so decent a character and dropped him into spectacularly bad company, hasn't the heart to leave him to his fate."

BALTIMORE SUN: "Jason Starr's Tough Luck (is) the kind of book you read with a wince, but you read it straight through because you can't put it down. Starr (is) a terrifically taut writer."

NEWSWEEK: "From the first page of this noir thriller, you know things are only going to get worse, but you can’t stop reading."