From Publishers Weekly
"Finding an Apartment in New York can be Murder" might have been the tagline of this entertaining, engagingly sloppy comic thriller. The plot centers around Cyrus, a trust fund dilettante turned serial killer who lures desperate New York apartment hunters into his clutches by advertising sublets in the Village Voice. Niles cuts quickly back and forth from an account of Cyrus's descent into madness to the tales of a clutch of prospective "tenants": Quinn, a handsome, perpetually blocked "Black Irish" writer; Tye Fisher, a gorgeous, charmingly criminal woman who has a more mercenary fake sublet scheme of her own; and Gus and Susie Neidermeyer, a young Midwestern couple whose fresh-out-of-college innocence dooms them to an early slaughter. With an investigative role played by Catrina Vermont, an aging TV reporter on the graveyard shift who is assigned to the story, the novel hurtles through New York's high and low society toward a clever if credulity-straining ending. Despite his murderous habits, Cyrus is the least interesting character, a rather perfunctory American Psycho retread. Niles's social satire lacks the stylish bite of that definitive yuppie-serial-killer novel, but also, thankfully, its pretentiousness. Niles writes in a jaunty, colloquial style that moves the action along nicely, but sometimes degenerates into a long string of clich‚s. She is at her best with dry, often hilariously over-the-top observations of New York life in general and the rituals of the apartment search in particular; at one point, a well-dressed young woman marches into a grotesque crime scene, stepping over bodies and ignoring the gore-spattered walls as she pulls out her checkbook to inquire, "Three months' deposit okay?" Scenes like this make the novel a fun, breezily grisly read.
Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.
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Niles presents more than a dozen characters at the beginning of this story and skillfully ties them together by the last scene. The eclectic cast includes serial-killer Cyrus, who places an ad for a sublet to lure desperate, homeless New Yorkers to his apartment; Tye, a Brit who cons people out of their money to survive; Quinn, an irresistible if somewhat irresponsible writer of fortune-cookie fortunes; and fashion designer Renee, who doggedly pursues a lead for her reporter girlfriend in an attempt to salvage their relationship. Niles comments humorously on the absurdity of the television media and America's culture of thinness, but the humor is decidedly black. Although her observations are often on target, the scenes featuring Cyrus at work are rather gruesome, and the contrast between these scenes and the lighter tone that prevails in the rest of the book can be jarring. Still, the novel is fast-paced and the story compelling enough that each short chapter leaves the reader wanting to find out how it will all come together in the end.
Beth WarrellCopyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
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