The Washington Times ran my On Crime column on Jason Starr’s The Next Time I Die.
“Dying was only the beginning. Steven Blitz didn’t
think about his own
safety when he saw
the man trying to force a woman into his car. He stepped in to
defend her and
got a knife to the gut for his troubles.
“But when he wakes up in the
hospital from what should have been a fatal wound, he finds the whole
world changed — a different president in the White House, a loving family when he’d been on average of
a divorce, more money in the bank then he’s ever seen. There’s
a dark side, though: in this world, Steven Blitz is
not a good man. And now he’s got to get himself
out of serious trouble without even knowing what it is he’s done wrong.”
This is how Hard Case Crime, the
publisher of Jason
Starr’s “The Next Time I Die,” describes the unusual crime
novel.
Hard Case Crime goes on to state that “The Next Time I Die” is a
paranoid thriller that will draw the reader into its claustrophobic web of
suspense, leaving one questioning everything one thinks one knows.
The publisher’s description certainly
drew me to the suspenseful, reality-bending crime novel. And I was not
disappointed.
The narrator of “The Next Time I
Die,” Steven
Blitz, a 47-year-old lawyer who is defending a brilliant
serial killer, has a fight with his disgruntled
wife, who throws him out of the
house. This leads him to a gas
station, a physical altercation and a stab wound, and his waking up in a
hospital to an entirely different world.
In this new reality, Steven Blitz discovers
that he has
lost weight, and gained an adoring wife, a loving young daughter, two women he is seeing on
the side, and a lot of money he apparently
earned playing the stock market. He has also gained
a stalker.
As if waking up in an alternate reality
was not frightening enough, Steven Blitz begins
to get a series of strange texts on his phone that
simply read, “I SAW YOU STEVEN BLITZ.”
“This is the entire text from an unknown
number displayed as ‘anontxt.’ The message would be disturbing and confusing
enough if it wasn’t the same ‘final though’ I had after that guy stabbed me in
the parking lot,” Steven Blitz informs
the reader. “Is this just some wild coincidence, or does this mean that after I
got stabbed, I had a premonition of this text? But how could I have a
premonition about an event in another life, or another version of my life?”
I reached out to Jason Starr and
asked him how he would describe
“The Next Time I Die.”
“When a prominent defense attorney tries
to break up a crime, he winds up
getting stabbed in the gut,” Mr. Starr replied. “He should have
died from the wound, but instead he winds up in a
new reality, somewhere between Philip K. Dick and The Twilight Zone.”
You can read the rest of the column via the below link:
BOOK REVIEW: 'The Next Time I Die' - Washington Times
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