Thrillers, Crimes - Fiction, Other Mystery Categories

The Exterminators: An Assassin Bug Thriller

Name: The Exterminators: An Assassin Bug Thriller
Author: Bill Fitzhugh
ISBN: 9781590585429

by Bill Fitzhugh

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Overview

All Bob Dillon ever wanted was a truck with a big fiberglass bug on the roof. All he had to do was survive a half dozen assassination attempts, pull a ten million dollar con on a Bolivian drug lord, and then fall off the face of the earth with his family and his new best friend, Klaus. Six years later, in The Exterminators, they surface in Oregon where they continue Bob's work creating an all-natural means of pest control. But now, instead of cross-breeding different strains of assassin bugs, they're using advanced gene sequencers to consolidate the perfect insect-killing-traits into one deadly bug. Only one problem: all this serious DNA tampering is expensive and they're running low on funds. The venture capital outfit that wants to invest turns out to be a front for DARPA (the Department of Defense agency charged with R&D for exotic weapons). It seems the U.S. Government wants to enlist Bob, Klaus, and the bugs in the War on Terror. Oh, and did we mention unlimited funding? An offer too good to refuse, they move to Los Angeles and get to work. Things go swimmingly until that Bolivian drug lord discovers he was conned out of his ten million. Vowing revenge, he offers twenty million to whoever kills Bob and Klaus. Some of the world's best assassins descend on Hollywood and, before you can say "It's an honor just to be nominated," the weirdness level reaches Apocalyptic levels. It's a battle pitting the far right against the far left with Bob stuck in the middle and subjected to some serious post-9/11 thinking.

About the Author, Bill Fitzhugh

Bill Fitzhugh is the award winning author of eight satiric crime novels. The New York Times called him "a strange and deadly amalgam of screenwriter and comic novelist. His facility and wit, and his taste for the perverse, put him in a league with Carl Hiaasen and Elmore Leonard." Fitzhugh's debut novel, Pest Control, was one of Amazon's Top 50 mysteries in 1997; it has been translated into half a dozen languages, produced as a stage musical, and a German radio show. Warner Brothers owns the film rights. Since 2005, Fitzhugh has also written, produced, and hosted "Fitzhugh's All Hand Mixed Vinyl" on Sirius XM Satellite Radio's Deep Tracks channel. He is one of only three outside hosts on Deep Tracks. The other two are Tom Petty and Bob Dylan.

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Editorials

Publishers Weekly

Fitzhugh’s second comic thriller featuring bug-killer Bob Dillon (after 1996’s Pest Control) has more twists and turns than a cockroach eluding a slipper. Bob and his sidekick, assassin Klaus Müller, are working in Oregon on developing “a ‘green’ alternative to chemical pest control” in the form of a genetically engineered insect from the assassin bug family. Short of cash, they turn for funding to a murky agency with a venture capitalist front that’s really connected to the Department of Defense, whose representative wants their help “in the war on terror.” Bob and Klaus wind up in Hollywood, where they become targets of a Bolivian drug lord who puts a million price tag on their heads. Along the way, the protagonist’s name, as in singer Bob Dylan, is good for a few yucks. Millennial religious fanatics, the film industry, the environment, both mainstream and right-wing media, all play a part in this delightful romp. (Jan.)

Kirkus Reviews

Those madcap bug-wielding assassins from Pest Control (1996) are back, and this time the stakes are even higher and the humor even lower. Six years after faking their deaths to escape the wrath of Miguel DeJesus Riviera, the drug lord whose brother they had killed, Bob Dillon and Klaus Müller one day hear a too-good-to-be-true offer from Joshua Treadwell, of Blue Sky Capital Partners, LLC, to fund their genetic research into all-natural extermination--that is, superbugs with an insatiable appetite for killing other bugs--by developing a cadre of counterterrorist bugs that are willing to kill people. Apart from its innate looniness, the only downside of Treadwell's offer is that his ability to track down Bob and Klaus means that their cover is blown, which gives them one more reason to relocate from Oregon to L.A. one step ahead of the wave of contract killers the surviving Riviera has loosed on them. Once the exterminators are safely ensconced in La-La Land, there'll be after-Oscar parties, double-crosses by double agents, brushes with other assassins and of course hordes of killer bugs whose victims rapidly spiral into the hundreds. Along the way, Fitzhugh (Radio Activity, 2004, etc.) finds time to skewer such ripe targets as the CIA, network-news broadcasts, Hollywood pitch sessions, talk-radio blowhards and millenialist Christians. Despite the high body count, the knockabout drive-in movie plotting and scattershot satire (think Godzilla with a laugh track) are all in good fun. Don't believe a word of it when you hear once again that the heroes have died.