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Summary
Summary
The conclusion of Hit and Run found Keller living in a big old house in post-Katrina New Orleans' Lower Garden District, with a new name (Nicholas Edwards), a new wife (Julia), a new career (rehabbing houses), and a baby on the way. It certainly looked as though he was done killing people for money. But old habits die hard, and when the economic downturn knocked out the construction business, a phone call from Dot draws him back into the old game. His work takes him to Dallas, to settle a domestic dispute; to Florida, where he joins a government witness on a West Indies cruise; to Wyoming, where a widow has her husband's stamp collection for sale; and to New York, where he lived for so many years, and where people might remember him.
Author Notes
Lawrence Block is the author of the popular series' featuring Bernie Rhodenbarr, Matthew Scudder, and Chip Harrison. Over 2 million copies of Lawrence Block's books are in print. He has published articles and short fiction in American Heritage, Redbook, Playboy, GQ, and The New York Times, and has published several collections of short fiction in book form, most recently Collected Mystery Stories.
Block is a Grand Master of Mystery Writers of America. He has won the Edgar and Shamus awards four times, the Japanese Maltese Falcon award twice, as well as the Nero Wolfe award. In France, he was proclaimed a Grand Maitre du Roman Noir and has been awarded the Societe 813 trophy twice. Block was presented with the key to the city of Muncie, Indiana, and is a past president of the Private Eye Writers of America and the Mystery Writers of America.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
MWA Grand Master Block's highly enjoyable, episodic third novel featuring philatelist and killer for hire John Keller (after 2008's Hit and Run) finds Keller living in New Orleans under a new name with his wife, Julia, and their baby daughter. Despite having a legitimate job in real estate, Keller can't resist resuming his old life after hearing from Dorothea "Dot" Harbison, who often gave him his assignments in the past. In inventive ways, Keller deals with a cheating wife in Dallas, a "felonious monk" in New York City, a cruise ship in Florida with a protected witness aboard, and a wandering husband in Denver. Meanwhile, he continues to build his "worldwide, to 1940" stamp collection. At times casually ruthless in snuffing out targets, Keller is also honest and ethical in his business dealings. A final assignment involving a child suggests that Keller may even play an unfamiliar white knight role, hopefully in the near future. Agent: Danny Baror, Baror International. (Feb.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Booklist Review
*Starred Review* Aficionados of Block's stamp-collecting contract killer will remember that in Hit and Run (2008), Keller was set up to take the fall for the assassination of a charismatic governor who was bidding to become president of the U.S. Life, as Keller knew it, was over, and Block ended the book with Keller foiling an attempted rape in New Orleans. Hit Me picks up the story several years later. Keller is married to Julia, the woman he saved from being raped. He is father to Jenny and co-owner of a small company that has done well rehabbing homes damaged by Hurricane Katrina. But the Great Recession has flattened his business, and Keller, somewhat reluctantly, returns to his lethal-but-lucrative former trade. His first assignment is to do away with the arrogant abbot of a monastery in Manhattan, whose testimony will convict a pack of corrupt Jersey pols. Keller, however, seems to have lost his murderous mojo to the simple joys of family. It's easy to imagine Block grinning as he reinvents his always fascinating character. Keller 2.0 is also more passionate about his hobby, and Block writes so appealingly about the world of philately that some fans might decide to take up stamp collecting. Hit Me is a delightful change of pace.--Gaughan, Thomas Copyright 2010 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
Gene Kerrigan's new police procedural, THE RAGE (Europa, paper, $17), isn't your typical Irish crime novel with moody cops and colorful crooks who talk like poets and act like animals. The singular characters who go about their business in Dublin's crippled economy may be on opposite sides of the law, but in Kerrigan's book they're all working-class stiffs struggling to get by. Everybody seems to have an opinion on the depressed state of the nation. "The politicians fell in love with the smart fellas," according to an old union man, "and in the end it was the smart fellas broke the country in pieces." That's pretty close to a midlevel gangster's view that "the big boys got too greedy, ran everything off a cliff." It falls to public servants like Detective Sergeant Bob Tidey to keep this barely contained anger from getting out of hand, as it does when an unknown party guns down a banker named Emmet Sweetman in the hallway of his tastefully appointed mansion. In no time at all, people are tossing Molotov cocktails into banks and beating up financiers and real estate developers. While the Sweetman case hovers in limbo, Kerrigan sets in motion a criminal scheme that gives all the principals a chance to exercise their individual work ethics. One key player in this drama is Vincent Naylor, a young ex-con with ambitions to better himself by being more selective about his crooked pursuits. ("The next time Vincent Naylor went to jail it would be for something worthwhile.") It's a class thing with Vincent. He makes a point of robbing snobby stores that sell merchandise at inflated "Celtic Tiger prices" and figures that knocking off an armored security truck loaded with bank money would be almost patriotic. By the time Vincent's plan is good to go, he has acquired an extensive group of criminal associates - and caught the eye of an ex-nun who knows trouble when she sees it. Kerrigan's clean, spare style adapts smoothly to the striving characters who lend their many voices to this narrative. The crooks may be more direct in their language and clear about their goals than the morally ambivalent Tidey. What's more striking, though, is the similarity of their aspirations and the familiarity of their discontents. (Vincent actually has a healthier relationship with his live-in girlfriend than Tidey does with his ex-wife, sneaking in and out of her bed so he won't upset their children.) Beneath the skin all these characters are underdogs, snarling with rage at being kicked too long by the crooked politicians, bankers and other looters who ran their country into the ground. What a nightmare! Two bodies have been unearthed in your flower beds, and you have no idea how they got there. But cheer up - the police might have dug up the body you personally planted at the edge of the wood. That's the premise of THREE GRAVES FULL (Gallery, $24.99), Jamie Mason's ripping good novel about Jason Getty, who suffers a lifetime of bullying until the day he gives in to "a howling primal rage" and turns on his tormentor. Masochist that he is, Jason had invited the predatory Gary Harris into his life with no more thought than those silly virgins who open their bedroom windows to Dracula. But Gary's cruelty extends beyond the grave. Mason has a witty and wicked imagination, yet she's also responsive to the pain of inarticulate people like Jason. Although he's become accustomed to sleeping in an empty bed, he's stirred by the sound of rustling sheets, "the background music of not being alone." Small towns promise many things: security, tranquillity and a sense of community. But all it takes is an act of violence for a small town to take back those promises. That's what Nora Hamilton learns in Jenny Milchman's quietly unnerving novel, COVER OF SNOW (Ballantine, $26), when Nora's husband, Brendan, inexplicably hangs himself. Brendan was a popular member of his hometown police force in Wedeskyull, a rugged outpost in the Adirondack Mountains of upstate New York. But Nora will always be a stranger here, she realizes, when everyone stonewalls her efforts to uncover whatever secrets in her husband's past drove him to kill himself. Although the solution to these mysteries is too obvious to raise goose bumps, Milchman reveals an intimate knowledge of the psychology of grief, along with a painterly gift for converting frozen feelings into scenes of a forbidding winter landscape. Despite claiming he's retired, Lawrence Block can't seem to resist taking a few swigs from the poisoned cup. HIT ME (Mulholland/Little, Brown, $26.99) brings back his most fatally appealing protagonist, the professional hit man known as Keller, last sighted in New Orleans with the newly acquired baggage of a wife, a baby and a construction business. Keller's passion for rare stamps leads him to take on a special assignment from his old booking agent, Dot, who has resurfaced in Sedona, Ariz. And soon enough, this imperfectly socialized killer is back in the game, taking contracts in cities like Dallas and New York, where a man can always find a good stamp auction. Aside from their ingenious methodology, what makes these amuse-bouches so delectable are the moral dilemmas Block throws up to deflect his philosophical antihero from a given task. Any assassin might hesitate to murder a child, but only Keller would ponder the ethics of killing someone whose premature death would rob a prostitute of payment for her professional services. In a flash, people are tossing Molotov cocktails into banks and beating up financiers.
Kirkus Review
After a full-length novel starring John P. Keller (Hit and Run, 2008), Block retreats to the form he prefers for his peripatetic hit man's outings (Hit Parade, 2006, etc.): a cycle of loosely linked stories. Times are tough for Keller. The squeeze in the real estate market has hurt the rehab construction business he and his partner, Donny Wallings, run in New Orleans, and there's his family to think of: his wife, Julia, who knows about his past even though he married her as Nicholas Edwards, and their daughter, Jenny, who's too young to know a thing about Daddy. So, when a phone call from his old scheduler, Dot Harbison, offers him a job in Dallas just as he's wondering how much he can afford to bid on a rare postage stamp he's got his eye on in the same city, he accepts with scarcely a ripple, and he's back in business again. Like the four commissions that follow, this one, the best of the five, seems simple but is rife with unexpected complications. Once he's hit his stride, and the target, Keller is ready to take out a Catholic abbot who got caught selling black-market kidneys, a wealthy informant headed for the Witness Protection Program, and in the longest and most intricate of these tales, a Denver stamp collector whose house burns to the ground with him inside before Keller can make his move. But can he break his own moral code and kill a likable 14-year-old philatelist whose scheming relatives have their eyes on his trust fund? "Keller's Obligation," the one serious letdown here, ends as it must but not in a way that's going to please the hit man's legion of fans. As usual, the most perceptive insights here depend on the interplay between what's said--endless discussions of early postal variations--and what's pointedly left unsaid time after time.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
Retirement was never in the cards for hit man Keller, who is living as married father Nicholas Edwards in New Orleans, where he rehabs real estate. But his legitimate business has tanked post-Katrina, and the account he uses for serious stamp collecting could use an injection of funds. So Keller is ready to take a contract when Dot, a voice from his past, calls with an offer. Even a mistake on his first time out-contract cancelled too late, not his fault-doesn't dissuade him, especially when he can combine his passion for philately with his sideline of killing for profit. VERDICT In the fifth entry in the Keller series (after Hit and Run), the appealing antihero with his own moral code continues to dig into the motives of his distant employers and make his own decisions about who deserves to die. But stamp collecting is more than just a secondary theme here, and Block's discourses about the history behind stamps are vivid enough to pique the interest even of those not at all inclined toward the hobby. Master mystery writer Block is at the top of his form here. [See Prepub Alert, 8/3/12.]-Michele Leber, Arlington, VA (c) Copyright 2012. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
