From Publishers Weekly
Mickey Prada is a quiet, unassuming teenager working in a fish market and living in Brooklyn, but by the end of this merciless, action-packed black comedy, he might as well be living in hell. 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. A new customer, Angelo Santoro, asks Mickey to place a few sports bets for him. Santoro seems to be a Made Guy, so Mickey doesn't feel he can refuse. But Santoro never makes good on his losses. As Mickey quickly plunges into debt, he grows desperate for a way out, even agreeing to go in on a house robbery with his pal Chris and some guys from his bowling team. From that point on, his downward slide is steep and seemingly unstoppable. A couple of dates with Rhonda, one of the first girls he likes who actually seems to like him back, provide a spell of relief, only to become another torment when her father tells Mickey to stop coming around. 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.
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.
In the noir novel
Cold Caller (1998), Starr introduced the kind of opportunistic, self-involved cynic you love to hate and gave him pretty much what he deserved. But Starr's gritty writing and hard-edged cynicism are more difficult to take this time because his protagonist, 19-year-old Mickey Prada, seems to be a pretty nice kid, even though he hasn't had it easy: his mother has died, his father has Alzheimer's, and he can barely make ends meet in his dead-end job. Still, the kid has a good heart, he has aspirations, and he has finally met a girl he really likes. Unfortunately, by the time Starr gets through with him, Mickey is toast--a thief, a suspected killer, and a stalker in the making. Tough luck, indeed. It could easily have turned into melodrama, but 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.
Stephanie ZvirinCopyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
