[close] With his debut novel, Cold Caller, Jason Starr emerged on the mystery scene as heir to the bleakly cynical Jim Thompson (The Grifters) and James M. Cain (Double Indemnity, The Postman Always Rings Twice). His follow-up effort, Nothing Personal, confirms Starr's position at the cutting edge of the revival of classic American noir, tracing in sharp relief lives of extinguished opportunity and of petty troubles that accumulate, somehow, into major crimes.

Thus it is that hapless Joey DePino, saddled with an incurable gambler's optimism--but even worse gambler's luck--finds himself threatened with the deadly wrath of irate and unpaid bookies. What to do? Drift into an inept plan to kidnap Jessica Sussman, that's what. Joey's wife Maureen and Jessica's mother Leslie were childhood friends, and Joey has endured enough anemic evenings at the Sussman's Upper East Side apartment in New York to feel entitled to a little ransom retribution. Too bad for him that David Sussman, Jessica's father, is currently trying to end an affair with a psychopathic coworker. Hell hath no fury, as everybody knows, and the result is a tangled mess of motive, mistaken identity, and murder. The lives of the Sussmans and the DePinos--so different on their (respectively) gilt-edged and tattered surfaces--form parallel strands intertwining and accelerating toward a dark nadir.

As a genre, noir is an acquired taste: be warned that Starr tends to forsake character development and verisimilitude for an irony outlined in exceedingly broad strokes. You may find yourself getting heartily sick of both the Sussmans and the DePinos--but take comfort in the fact that Starr himself has an equally low opinion of his characters, and is only too ready to offer them up, in the finale, as grist for a bitingly sharp dinner-party mill. --Kelly Flynn [close]