Fake I.D.

A degenerate gambler, and even worse human being, tries to buy one fifth of an interest in a racing horse. The guy is scum - a bad friend, a bad employee, and a terrible ‘boyfriend’. And he’s completely delusional. It’s kind of hard to read a book that has a main character that is as big of a scum bag as him!

And his boss has to be one of the dumbest characters ever written! Almost impossibly dumb, but nevertheless, he somehow owns a bar! The whole book is just dumb people doing and saying dumb things and I'm sort of embarrassed that I finished the thing. I guess I'm dumb too!

Tommy Russo, the point-of-view protagonist of Fake I.D. is a difficult character to appreciate. He's a sociopath and idiot prone to hare-brained schemes, and you can't help but cheer for his eventual downfall. This type of narration is not unique to the Hard Case Crime imprint, which has put out similar works like The Peddler and The Confession. I prefer the Max and Angela series by Starr and Ken Bruen to this skeevy story.

In its way like some of the best of Jim Thompson, it's a first-person story of horse racing, robbery, gambling, and murder. The main character is thoroughly despicable, if not insane like some of Thompson's heroes. The book pulls you through it, and the characters are pretty sharply drawn.

Another disappointing entry in the Hard Case Crime series. Writer Starr puts words together well enough and the story moves right along, which is a good thing, because otherwise I would have given in to my strong urges to just put the whole thing aside as a waste of time. This is one of those pointless books where everything relies on a protagonist who just does one stupid thing after another. Ostensibly it's all about getting $10,000 to buy a stake in a race horse, but Starr doesn't put in enough effort on that part of the plot to make it even halfway believable. So on and on it goes, with the main character winning some money then immediately gambling it away. OK, so perhaps this is a good portrait of a compulsive gambler, but who show more cares when he's such a louse to begin with? The other characters in the book--the women he sleeps with, his boss, his co-workers, the police--are complete cardboard. Much better writers like Charles Willeford and Dan J. Marlowe have shown us how to create a bleak noir where there are no heroes and yet keep us entertained and maybe even teach us a thing or two along the way about human nature, the contracting business, ex-Servicemen, or whatever. When you get to the end of this book, you just don't care what happens. The writer hasn't earned your respect. The only one who will get anything out of this book is Starr. Hard to understand why Hard Case would reprint it. show less

Good book, great writing, but I was disappointed with the ending. I was really expecting the horse racing syndicate to be a scam. But should I really be disappointed if I expected the ovious and didn't get it?

A gripping portrayal of the downward spiral of an aspiring actor whose day job is a bouncer in a bar. Starr illustrates his gambling addiction well and how he keeps believing he is going to make it as an actor and then a racehorse owner but a failed audition, a robbery and murder will ensure the dreams remain unrealised.