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Overview
Keller is a regular guy. He goes to the movies, works on his stamp collection. Call him for jury duty and he serves without complaint. Then every so often he gets a phone call from White Plains that sends him flying off somewhere to kill a perfect stranger. Keller is a pro and very good at what he does. But the jobs have started to go wrong. The realization is slow coming yet, when it arrives, it is irrefutable: Someone out there is trying to hit the hit man. Keller, God help him, has found his way onto somebody else's hit list.
Synopsis
Keller is the consummate pro, the "hit man's hit man." A complex individual, he has survived a serious mid-life crisis, with its accompanying self-doubts and career worries, and now he's back on the job, with a new list of targets. But something is not right, and it has his razor-sharp instincts tingling. He has been in this business too long not to recognize what is rapidly becoming obvious: that he, himself, is in another's rifle sight; that someone has put out a contract on him!
Book Magazine
John Keller first cropped up in Playboy, where most of his exploits were chronicled in Lawrence Block's short stories. In this book, Keller travels the country knocking off people he's paid to knock off, and occasionally makes stops along the way to do some shopping or to look for stamps to add to his collection. And he's always checking in with and talking to Dot, the woman who is his job broker. This is the first true Keller novel—last year's Hit Man was in fact a collection of the short stories in which Keller appeared. The longer form should allow Block to stretch and develop Keller more, but what he does instead is give us more of the same. Much more. If I never read about stamps again, or have to read through another scene where there's a pitcher of tea to get through while characters talk it empty, I'll be just fine. What Dot and Keller figure out is that a hired assassin is out there killing his colleagues, eliminating the competition and raising the price. They attempt to trap the killer—whom they call, affectionately, Roger, though they have no idea who he really is. In the meantime, Keller does get involved with a woman, has his fortune told and spends a lot of time serving jury duty. I loved reading the book but was irritated with its many tangents—it often felt like a short story that couldn't figure out how to stop itself.
—Randy Michael Signor
Editorials
From Barnes & Noble
Our ReviewHit the Hit Man
Keller, the solitary contract killer last seen in 1998's Hit Man is back. Hit Man, a collection of linked stories by Grand Master Lawrence Block, took us deeply into the violent, contradictory life of a remorselessly efficient murderer. In Hit List, the first novel-length Keller adventure, Block expands and deepens his compelling portrait of the man he has dubbed, "the Urban Lonely Guy of Assassins."
Put another way, Keller represents the Assassin as Everyman. He is a quiet, unremarkable- looking fellow who loves dogs, collects stamps, fumbles his way through a series of temporary relationships, and speculates about the forces -- karmic, genetic, astrological -- that have made him what he is. But every now and then he accepts a commission from a matronly, middle-aged lady name Dot, travels to a distant city, and murders a perfect stranger.
Hit List is an episodic, deliberately meandering novel that recapitulates the structure of its predecessor, cutting back and forth between Keller's wildly divergent personal and professional lives. Unlike Hit Man, however, this book has a single, central dramatic device that powers the plot: Keller's discovery that he himself is now the target of an unidentified killer.
Keller, together with Dot, comes to this conclusion gradually, after a number of routine assignments take inexplicable turns. An adulterous couple who inherit Keller's motel room are shot to death. A pair of Keller's prospective victims die prematurely. A small-time thief steals Keller's raincoat and is murdered shortly afterward. Eventually, Dot and Keller piece together the bizarre but undeniable truth: that a fellow "professional" -- known only as Roger -- is busily eliminating rival hit men, in the hope of grabbing a larger share of a limited but lucrative market.
Keller's attempts to elude his pursuer, continue practicing his profession, and, in the end, turn the tables on Roger form the dramatic center of this witty, compulsively readable book. But the real heart of the novel -- its non-dramatic center -- is Block's pitch-perfect rendering of his lethal protagonist's day-to-day life. Hit List is filled with colorful, sharply observed set pieces -- long, circular dialogues between Keller and Dot, an emotional encounter with an overweight astrologer, a funny, surprisingly romantic account of Keller's first experience with jury duty -- that are worth the price of admission all by themselves. Block, like Keller, is a consummate professional: resourceful, reliable, always capable of the unexpected move. The Keller stories constitute a unique contribution to modern crime fiction, and are the clear product of a master craftsman at the top of his considerable form.
--Bill Sheehan
Bill Sheehan reviews horror, suspense, and science fiction for Cemetery Dance, The New York Review of Science Fiction, and other publications. His book-length critical study of the fiction of Peter Straub, At the Foot of the Story Tree, has just been published by Subterranean Press (www.subterraneanpress.com).
John Keller first cropped up in Playboy, where most of his exploits were chronicled in Lawrence Block's short stories. In this book, Keller travels the country knocking off people he's paid to knock off, and occasionally makes stops along the way to do some shopping or to look for stamps to add to his collection. And he's always checking in with and talking to Dot, the woman who is his job broker. This is the first true Keller novel—last year's Hit Man was in fact a collection of the short stories in which Keller appeared. The longer form should allow Block to stretch and develop Keller more, but what he does instead is give us more of the same. Much more. If I never read about stamps again, or have to read through another scene where there's a pitcher of tea to get through while characters talk it empty, I'll be just fine. What Dot and Keller figure out is that a hired assassin is out there killing his colleagues, eliminating the competition and raising the price. They attempt to trap the killer—whom they call, affectionately, Roger, though they have no idea who he really is. In the meantime, Keller does get involved with a woman, has his fortune told and spends a lot of time serving jury duty. I loved reading the book but was irritated with its many tangents—it often felt like a short story that couldn't figure out how to stop itself.
—Randy Michael Signor