“Don’t worry,” a voice whispers. “You really only need one.”   Phineas Poe, disgraced cop turned psychiatric case, turned murder suspect, turned reluctant kidney donor, gives $200 to a beautiful woman in a red dress, a scar at the edge of her mouth and a body like a knife. He then wakes up in a bath of melting ice, blood on his fingers and staples in his sides. Now she haunts his dreams and his days. She’s got his kidney on ice and her teeth in his heart.   Finding her means throwing himself into a drug-blurred underworld. Falling in love with her means fighting to avoid becoming her accomplice as well as her victim.   Fast, corrosive wit, glittering, razor-sharp images, a cast of comic and sinister characters, part love story, part mystery, part hallucination, Kiss Me, Judas is a startling novel of modern noir.   “A surreal nightmare full of the hard-boiled nourish spirit of Raymond Chandler.” – San Francisco Chronicle In his extremely dark but very effective first thriller, former cabdriver and homeless counselor Will Christopher Baer takes that old urban legend of the man who wakes up in a hotel bathtub full of ice to discover that somebody has removed one of his kidneys and whips it up into a modernized Edgar Allan Poe nightmare. Baer's hero is in fact called Phineas Poe--an ex-cop who spent six years digging up dirt in and on the Denver P.D.'s Internal Affairs Division. On his first night out after a nervous breakdown and a six-month stay in a psychiatric hospital, Poe is picked up by a prostitute named Jude who drugs his drink and deftly removes his kidney. Poe heads for the Witch's Teat, a sex shop where his friend Crumb works. "Crumb isn't really a doctor. He does cheap abortions and gunshot wounds and even dental work for the mad and desperate," Baer writes in deceptively plain present-tense prose, which quickly mesmerizes like electronic music. "Crumb reads a lot. He has a closet full of old surgical textbooks and a lot of stolen equipment. And he doesn't try to fake you. If you come to him with a ruptured bowel or a crushed spine, he gives you a cup of tea and sends you to the hospital." Poe learns that his kidney has been replaced by a bag of heroin--which could kill him if it dissolves. Intent on retrieving his stolen organ, he traces Jude to a bowling alley called the Inferno. Strangely enough, with Jude he reluctantly discovers the chance of love and family that he thought was gone forever when his wife died. In lesser hands, this flash of light in a roomful of noir could easily have spoiled everything. But Baer makes it all seem as natural as whistling in the dark. --Dick Adler 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. Phineas Poe, an ex-Internal Affairs cop, walks straight out of a mental hospital into his worst nightmare: after drinks with a mysterious woman, he comes to in a bloody, ice-filled hotel bathtub?missing a kidney. "If you want to live, call 911," reads the note left with him. Poe breaks out of the hospital in search of Jude, his seductress, unsure of whether he will kill her or have sex with her and then kill her. Flashbacks and hallucinations, drug-induced and otherwise, hint that Poe has more to deal with than organ-stealing vamps: namely, the bizarre circumstances of his wife's death. A paranoid thriller; for public libraries.?Christine Perkins, Jackson Cty Lib. Svcs., Medford, OR Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc. Baer's first novel is an unending nightmare of drugs, sex, and violence, in which neither the main character nor, probably, the reader is able to tell the difference between what's real and what's hallucinatory. Phineas Poe, formerly of the Internal Affairs Division of the Denver Police Department and recently released psychiatric patient, picks up a young woman in a bar one night and wakes up the next morning in a hotel room bathtub that's filled with ice, holding a slip of paper that reads "If you want to live, call 911." His attempts to track down the woman from the bar and understand what's happening, as well as his ability to remember his past, are made more difficult by the massive quantity of drugs he's ingesting and injecting. As Poe vainly tries to decide whom to trust, he makes his way through an underworld of illicit organ harvests, feuding families, and deadly games. 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. Nancy Pearl Stylistically superb debut that reinvents the thriller, dots every noir, and slashes every t, each note pitch-perfect as a presto from hell. After six years with Denver's Internal Affairs Division as a rat sniffing about the IAD itself, Phineas Poe has a nervous breakdown, his wife dies (leukemia? suicide? murder?), he t