Cold Caller: A White-Collar Noir Book

A ravingly readable tale of a downwardly mobile yuppie who'll just kill to get ahead. Think Jim Thompson with an MBA.

Library Journal

Starr's first novel is a lightly written story about the woes of Bill Moss, a once glitzy advertising executive in Manhattan who one day gets fired from his dream job. Living with his fiance and with a rent as high as the Empire State Building, Bill wastes no time and takes a temporary part-time job as a telemarketing rep for a down-and-out long-distance phone company. His boss has it in for him since Bill is the new "hotshot" that his boss never was. Between Bill's boss humiliating him day after day and his fiance pressuring him to get a "real job," it's easy to predict that something big, but not necessarily good, is about to happen. The story moves along rapidly, although the motivation for Bill's murder is not quite believable. In addition, Starr's characters are not very sympathetic. Still, patrons who liked Bret Easton Ellis's American Psycho (LJ 1/91) will enjoy the dark humor.Brent Newmoyer, "Library Journal"