Billy Summers

June 15, 2021
The ever prolific King moves from his trademark horror into the realm of the hard-boiled noir thriller. "He's not a normal person. He's a hired assassin, and if he doesn't think like who and what he is, he'll never get clear." So writes King of his title character, whom the Las Vegas mob has brought in to rub out another hired gun who's been caught and is likely to talk. Billy, who goes by several names, is a complex man, a Marine veteran of the Iraq War who's seen friends blown to pieces; he's perhaps numbed by PTSD, but he's goal-oriented. He's also a reader--Zola's novel Th�r�se Raquin figures as a MacGuffin--which sets his employer's wheels spinning: If a reader, then why not have him pretend he's a writer while he's waiting for the perfect moment to make his hit? It wouldn't be the first writer, real or imagined, King has pressed into service, and if Billy is no Jack Torrance, there's a lovely, subtle hint of the Overlook Hotel and its spectral occupants at the end of the yarn. It's no spoiler to say that whereas Billy carries out the hit with grim precision, things go squirrelly, complicated by his rescue of a young woman--Alice--after she's been roofied and raped. Billy's revenge on her behalf is less than sweet. As a memoir grows in his laptop, Billy becomes more confident as a writer: "He doesn't know what anyone else might think, but Billy thinks it's good," King writes of one day's output. "And good that it's awful, because awful is sometimes the truth. He guesses he really is a writer now, because that's a writer's thought." Billy's art becomes life as Alice begins to take an increasingly important part in it, crisscrossing the country with him to carry out a final hit on an errant bad guy: "He flopped back on the sofa, kicked once, and fell on the floor. His days of raping children and murdering sons and God knew what else were over." That story within a story has a nice twist, and Billy's battered copy of Zola's book plays a part, too. Murder most foul and mayhem most entertaining. Another worthy page-turner from a protean master.

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Starred review from June 21, 2021
Ex-Army sniper turned hit man Billy Summers, the protagonist of this tripwire-taut thriller from MWA Grand Master King (Later), who views himself as “a garbageman with a gun,” decides his 18th assassination will be his last. But he rightly smells something fishy in the promised $2 million payout and runs rogue when things go south with his employers. Matters get complicated when a rape victim whose life he saves becomes his confidante and a participant in his plans to get even. King meticulously lays out the details of Billy’s trade, his Houdini-style escapes, and his act to look simpler than he is, but the novel’s main strength is a story within a story: as he preps for months in the small town “east of the Mississippi and just south of the Mason-Dixon Line” where the hit will happen, Billy, masquerading as a novelist, writes his lightly fictionalized autobiography, which grows more candid as it inches closer to current events and illustrates a line he remembers from a Tim O’Brien interview that fiction “was the way to the truth.” This is another outstanding outing from a writer who consistently delivers more than his readers expect. Agent: Chuck Verrill, Darhansoff & Verrill.

Starred review from July 1, 2021
One last job? Again? But, when even the fictional character embarking on that last job is aware he's trapped in a trope, you know you're in for something different. How different? King has multiple novels in play here--a thriller, at least two coming-of-age stories, and a knockout road novel--and he knits them together beautifully, never missing a stitch. Billy Summers is a former Marine sniper who, like Max Allan Collins' Quarry, only hits bad guys; Billy wants out of the game, but he needs a stake. The job requires lead time, during which Billy poses as a writer and finds that he likes it; he's good, too, as we find ourselves totally drawn into the tale of Billy's dysfunctional family, his years in a juvenile detention home, and his experience during the Iraq War. That's plenty, but there's much more. Laying low after the hit (and after he realizes he's been tabbed as a fall guy), Billy saves college student Alice, a rape victim, and the two hit the road, driving cross-country to Denver, where Billy gathers information from his former handler, a wonderfully realized, grandfatherly outlaw, and begins to track the bad guys behind the frame. More road trips follow, as Alice emerges as a scene-stealing heroine on her own coming-of-age journey. King has never been better than he is here at wrapping readers into a propulsive, many-tentacled narrative--complete with a perfectly orchestrated, moving ending.

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