Kiss Me, Judas - Taschenbuch

Illegal organ appropriation has become a standard theme of the thriller (Robin Cook's Coma being the most successful example of the genre). Baer has something new to bring to the theme, however. For a start, the first-person narrative here has a brilliantly sharp and witty edge, with the black humour cunningly offsetting the grisly business of kidney theft. Starting as a salutary reminder that casual sexual encounters can have highly dangerous consequences, Baer has ex-cop Phineas Poe (shame about the name, but it's Baer's only miscalculation) becoming an unwilling kidney donor--as well as a murder suspect--after a $200 tryst with a woman who had designs on more than one of his organs. The fact that Poe is in love with the woman who left him in a bath full of ice with staples in his side makes this more than just a thriller: we're in the kind of crazed love story territory of writers like Barry Gifford, and Baer has the same outrageous gifts. There's also a strange but convincing literary structure to the book, with its short, punchy paragraphs and disturbingly distorted time sense creating a bizarre stop-start effect that nevertheless ensures the reader's total attention. --Barry Forshaw