Synopses & Reviews
Have you ever loved someone who's mortally wounded you? Red dress, black hair, body like a knife...
Phineas Poe, disgraced cop and morphine addict, has just been released from a psych ward when he meets a beautiful woman named Jude in a hotel bar. Red dress, black hair, body like a knife. He takes her back to his room and wakes the next morning in a bathtub full of blood and ice, missing a kidney. Dragging himself from a hospital bed, Phineas discovers he wants to be with Jude like a hunger and he wants to find her and kill her. Falling for her is the start of a twisted love story that takes him from the snowy streets of Denver to the high plains of Texas where the boundaries between torturer and victim, killer and accomplice, become nightmarishly distorted.
Review
"Stylistically superb debut that reinvents the thriller....Baer will almost certainly write better books than this, but probably not with such youthful verve, bare nerve-ends, or frigidly droll, dead-on metaphors." Kirkus Reviews
Review
"A stylish exercise in neo-noir paranoia, wall-to-wall deceit and sexual obsession." The Chicago Tribune
Review
"Although there are obvious biblical allusions in Baer's stylized debut, this noir tale takes no clearly biblical route....[Jude is] not what she seems and where they ultimately end up provides this intriguing tale with a quirky, redemptive glow." Publishers Weekly
Review
"[A]n unending nightmare of drugs, sex, and violence....Although stylish, edgy, and with the right director, a wonderful movie in waiting, this novel is not for the faint of heart or weak of stomach." Booklist
Review
"Not for the faint of heart, Kiss Me, Judas starts off bloody and zooms nonstop to a gripping climax. Baer's minimalist debut novel is reminiscent of a Quentin Tarantino film dark, graphic, and twisted but without the quirky humor....Recommended." Library Journal
Review
"A deconstruction of an urban legend, a dark unraveling of mystery within mystery, Kiss Me, Judas is a fine and dangerous work." Poppy Z. Brite, author of Exquisite Corpse
Review
"I was finally able to read Kiss Me, Judas and absolutely loved it. The writing is perfect, synergistic and so beautifully interwoven with the story, the reader is put through an extraordinary experience. The hallucinatory sequences are so perfect I am still not certain what is real and what is not, and I don't care. I experienced the book, and I still am." Hubert Selby, Jr., author of Last Exit to Brooklyn and Requiem for a Dream
Review
"Kiss Me, Judas is ingeniously plotted, a perfect noir novel, right up there with Chandler's The Big Sleep." Madison Smartt Bell, author of All Souls' Rising
Synopsis
A stylish debut novel of modern noir, Kiss Me, Judas is a hypnotic tale of paranoia, betrayal, and doomed love for fans of L.A. Confidential and Pulp Fiction.
About the Author
Will Christopher Baer was born in 1966 in Mississippi and grew up in Memphis, Tennessee. He has won fiction prizes from Story Magazine and has published work in Bomb and Nerve. He lives in California.