Snitch World

August 5, 2013
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.

September 15, 2013
Klinger describes himself as a resident of San Francisco's asteroid belt of petty crime and criminals, never making the big score but never doing time in the state's prison system. He's bright and affable visiting his San Franciscochic former lover, who has quit her day job, thanks to a phone app she wrote. But the $100 she gives him sends him right back to the Hawse Hole, a Tenderloin dive, where he drinks himself into oblivion doing mental arithmetic to estimate how long his money will last. A botched mugging tosses him in the path of Marci, another sexy, San Franciscochic app shark who is obsessed with the big score and happy to make Klinger the fall guy. Nisbet, who has a cult following (Windward Passage, 2010), alludes insightfully to the dualities of America's favorite city. Fortyish, homeless, alcoholic petty criminals colliding with well-educated, well-off, amoral, twentysomething grifters doesn't completely strain credulity. The Hawse Hole and its regulars are fascinating. But occasionally Nisbet's rhetorical flights, which begin thoughtfully and gracefully, go on too long and begin to seem like bafflegab.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2013, American Library Association.)