A first novel that is first rate. It is a portrait of a man whose personality flaws are revealed over the course of the novel in a believable progression. The story is told in the first person by a man who lost his position in a big advertising firm a couple of years before our story begins. He is living with his girlfriend and paying the bills by working in a sales phone bank selling phone plans. This book was written in the 1990's and I believe most of these type of jobs have been outsourced.

The book that launched Jason Starr's career, and the book that got me hooked onto his dark, crime noir style of writing.All his protagonists are creepy, devious, and evil. Yet you can't seem to avoid rooting for them to get out of their predicaments.The closest author I can think of who most resembles his works and characters is Patricia Highsmith and her famous Talented Mr. Tom Ripley character.

The plot is easy to follow,and narrative crisp and clear,but sorry something is missing for me.Probably I have a deja-vu feeling that I've read this kind before.Reading it again may give me a different impression.

I always knew that telemarketers were sociopaths. I knew it, I knew it, I knew it.

what about the fingerprints on the wallet?how could the prostitute know Ed was his boss?so many plot holes.what happened to the author and editors?

I thoroughly enjoyed this thriller. Cold Caller was fast paced, had dark humour, and felt like a bit of a tame version of American Psycho at times. This was really easy to listen to in audiobook format, and I found myself taking it around the house with me all day, as I couldn't stop listening to it.I borrowed this through Amazon Kindle Unlimited.

COLD CALLER is one of those books that gets better the more times I read it.The dialogue is crisp, clever, and portrays the mindset of lead character Bill in perfect clarity. From his deluded thoughts of justice to his misguided sense of right and wrong, author Jason Starr manages to make Bill's rationale honest whilst being equally murderous. As far as white collar noir goes, COLD CALLER is right up there. The plot is bullet riddled with acts of easy violence that almost feel natural as Bill cl...

ONE SENTENCE SUMMARY: A dark, twisted roller coaster ride and certainly a story you will not easily forget.BRIEF REVIEW: Bill Moss was once a VP of an ad agency but, now he works as a telemarketer at ACA, a call center in New York City. It's a horrible company that engages in racially discriminatory practices by paying larger commissions to white employees and wrongly laying off a higher percentage of black employees to avoid paying out their commissions. Bill hates his job and feels under appre...

This is Starr's first novel. At times the prose struck me as either overly mannered or overly amateurish, but overall he turns in a great performance, updating the conventions of the classic noir tale to familiar and believable contemporary NYC surroundings. The ending is a surprise, but also the only possible (and fitting) conclusion. This one makes me want to read more Starr.

Cold Caller – Dark White Collar NoirCold Caller by Jason Starr has been dubbed white collar noir and having read and enjoyed his short thriller it is easy to see why it has attracted that tag. Cold Caller gets darker the more you read and the more you read the easier it is to identify with Bill Moss. If you have ever worked in a call centre those soul destroying places that are the modern satanic mills then you will closely identify with what Starr has written, especially about some of the daft

Cold Caller by neo-noir master, author Jason Starr, is pretty good! It's Starr's first published novel and his unique style is fully in-place. The story follows narcissistic sociopath Bill Moss through his low-level career and love-life in New York City...and the only answer to his life issues there appears to be murder....It may sound like American Psycho but as opposed to that novel Bill Moss's world is very tightly, tightly controlled by who else...Bill Moss! Author Starr's technique of turni...

This is a really weak noir that I felt had some promise, but ultimately squandered it's opportunity with a weak, predictable story that took far too long to unfold, and a dull, unrelatable character whom I disliked more and more as the story progressed.There was too much fluff to pad out the barely there story, I couldn't sympathise or relate to the main character at all and overall I felt sorry for the people he had to interact with. I get that the protagonist is some sort of narcissistic yuppy...

Awful on so many levels...

I'm glad this audiobook is over - didn't even care about what happened to him at the end, just know he deserved it...

Darkly comic take of a deluded egotist making some very bad decisions.. highly readable!Cold Caller is Jason Starr’s 1997 debut and is classified as American noir, specifically hard-boiled white collar noir and having read very little of the genre I wasn’t sure quite what to expect. Whilst I am not sure that I enjoyed the novel or would recommend it, I certainly couldn’t stop reading and that certainly says something. Why? Firstly due to how bizarre it seemed and secondly due to the wryly amusin...

A bit of a weird one this! I received a random add from a verified author on Twitter, and so browsed some of his stuff. This book seemed short enough, with a decent enough concept to hook me in.

Unfortunately, this book is just a bit too ridiculous to be deemed good. For a start, the cited plot concept only occurs half way through the book, meaning the first half is pointless preamble. Not only this, the characters were all so wooden and often cliche. I also maintain that using racism to make t...

0 stars.I was... thoroughly disappointed. Maybe my copy was wrong, but calling this a 'book' would be an insult to all the other novels out there. Let's start with the things I liked. I actually liked the writing style. Though it wasn't anything special, it was good and was actually the only thing that was consistent and good throughout this... story. Every character had a distinct 'voice'.Now to the stuff I didn't like.... oh boy.It read like a first draught of a school boy, who is the most "am...

Jason Starr is the kind of solid, dependable thriller writer i can get behind. Kinda trashy, but deceptively astute, incredibly well-plotted, sharp, funny and really dark. In this one, you're not exactly rooting for the character, he's a scumbucket, but there's something about him that you sympathise with. It's a neat trick, and his slow moral descent is pretty funny and frighteningly realistic. Not sure if it jumped the shark at the end. A total page-turner though.

Jason Starr is a hidden gem. It's a shame, he hasn't got the recognition he deserves. There are not many authors, who can evoke such tension and page, and even more so: maintain this tension for the entire book. I only hope that Mr. Starr will write more novels.

It's good realistic, fast paced, do-not think too much about it, crime book. Very effective if you want to mentally shield yourself from feeling guilty when you're very abrupt with telemarketers over the phone. I picked it up when I found myself without a book on me but with a train ride to go, it did what I wanted from it: it was a fast read, not too involving, not too demanding on the brain. Now I can move on to other things.