Snitch World
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- $9.99
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
“The Miata jumped the curb and sheared off a light pole. The impact deployed the airbags, but Chainbang was ready. He knifed Klinger’s before it was fully inflated and his own before it could crush the glass pipe in his breast pocket. The six-inch blade went through the nylon like a pit bull through a kindergarten.”
Snitch World takes place in a San Francisco of menacing technology, where the old cons come up short and the crimes of the gritty night have morphed into slick capers pulled off by the glow of a smartphone.
Klinger hangs out at the Hawse Hole, a sordid dive even by Tenderloin standards. All he really wants is enough cash to buy a cup of coffee, some cigarettes, a bug-free hotel room. The simple act of picking a carefully targeted mark’s pocket initiates a series of events that get stranger and more dangerous by the moment. Jim Nisbet, with his characteristic humor and brilliant prose, creates a world where trust, and even cash, are the avatars of a loser’s game.
This is Snitch World, where a nine-dollar app can be as deadly as a dirty needle.
Also included is a recent interview with Jim Nisbet, in conversation with Patrick Marks, owner and publisher of San Francisco’s The Green Arcade, talking about writing, books, and technology.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
A missing smartphone filled with high-tech secrets spells trouble for small-time San Francisco grifter Klinger in Nisbet's low-key thriller, something of a companion novel to 2012's Old and Cold, about a homeless San Francisco hit man. All Klinger wants to do is sit in the Hawse Hole bar and drink the days away, swapping stories with fellow patrons. But he's got the phone, and an aggressive Silicon Valley femme fatale, Marci, wants it. " I've never had an orgasm,' she suddenly announced." To which Klinger replies: "There's probably an app for that." The plot is as much about displacement as it is tech spying, as the latest dot-com boom makes the city more and more unaffordable. Klinger, barely able to cover a few days in a flophouse, is a textbook noir protagonist faced with economic and personal doom. Fans of the movies Detour and Barfly will identify.