Hit List - Hardcover

Block, Lawrence

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0060198338 ISBN 13: 9780060198336

Publisher: William Morrow, 2000

Synopsis

Keller is a regular guy, a solid citizen. Call him for jury duty and he serves without complaint. He goes to the movies, watches the tube, browses the art galleries, and works diligently on his stamp collection. But every now and then a call from the breezily efficient Dot sends him off to kill a total stranger. He takes a plane, rents a car, finds a hotel room, and gets back before the body is cold.

He's a real pro, cool and dispassionate and very good at what he does. Until one day when Dot breaks her own rule and books him for a hit in New York, his home base. She sends him to an art gallery opening, and the girl he gets lucky with steers him to an astrologer. He's a Gemini, his moon's in Taurus . . . and he's got a murderer's thumb.

Then the jobs start to go wrong. Targets die before he can draw a bead on them. The realization is slow in coming, but there's no getting around it: Somebody out there is trying to hit the hit man. Keller, God help him, has found his way on to somebody else's hit list.

Darker than Keller's conscience, and as riveting, surprising, and wickedly funny as his sensational New York Times bestselling debut, Hit Man, Lawrence Block's Hit List only serves to confirm the Wall Street Journal's estimation of the multiple-award-winning author as "one of the very best writers now working the beat." 

About this title

About the Author

Lawrence Block is one of the most widely recognized names in the mystery genre. He has been named a Grand Master of the Mystery Writers of America and is a four-time winner of the prestigious Edgar and Shamus Awards, as well as a recipient of prizes in France, Germany, and Japan. He received the Diamond Dagger from the British Crime Writers' Association—only the third American to be given this award. He is a prolific author, having written more than fifty books and numerous short stories, and is a devoted New Yorker and an enthusiastic global traveler.

Reviews

John Keller, whom Block introduced in Hit Man, is a killer for hire, with a difference. He's thoughtful, even broody, tends to take a liking to some of the towns where he goes to do his work, dreams of perhaps settling down in one of them one day and collects stamps in his spare time, of which there's plenty. It's a novel idea, and it carried an excellent group of stories in the previous book. A whole novel about Keller, however, who after all walks a very delicate line between likability and horror, is more than he can readily bear, and, almost unknown in Block's work, there are longueurs here. The plot is wryly serviceableAa rival is attempting to corner the market by getting to some of Keller's intended victims first, and clearly has to be disposed ofAbut about halfway through a certain unease creeps in and won't let go. For all Block's usual great skill with goofy dialogue (here between Keller and Dot, the intermediary who takes the orders for his jobs), it's difficult to indefinitely enjoy jokes about the violent deaths of a number of people who, for all Dot and Keller know, are harmless, perhaps even good citizens, but whom someone is willing to pay to remove. Apparently mindful of this, Block keeps the killings mostly offstage, or with a minimum of graphic violence. But an affection for Keller is an acquired taste, and here it proves difficult to acquire. 9-city author tour. (Nov.)
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Fresh from his triumphant star turn in the short-story cycle Hit Man (1998), Block's reflective professional assassin John Keller finally fulfills his fans' dearest wish by getting a novel of his own.Although Keller is a solid citizen who collects stamps, shows up for jury duty, and carries out every hit with consummate professionalism-even if his employer is tactless enough to identify the subject by showing Keller a Christmas card photograph of his family-things don't seem to be going right for him. Narrowly escaping death while he's on the job in Louisville, he returns to New York to accept a contract that feels like an interpolated short story. Continuing on his methodically death-dealing rounds in Tampa, in Boston, in the Chicago suburbs, he takes time out only for casual sex with jewelry-maker Maggie Griscomb and a reading from astrologer Louise Carpenter that reduces him to tears. But little things that go wrong with almost every job make it increasingly clear that he's attracted the attention of a rival hit man who doesn't think the country is big enough for both of them. Don't expect the high intensity produced in the Keller stories by their central irony, the contrast between the hero's lethal profession and his organization-man lifestyle and opinions. Instead, listen for the equally ironic but maddeningly meandering conversations between Keller and Dot, his prim scheduler in White Plains.These conversations, which seem such blather, are blather whose interplay of banality and olympian judgment, as in James M. Cain and Quentin Tarantino, forms the real heart of this modern samurai fable.(Author tour) -- Copyright © 2000 Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

With Hit List, the usually reliable Block misfires. The character of Keller is back from Hit Man, and he still seems like a normal guy until he gets a call from his boss to complete an assignment. Being a hit man, his job entails killing total strangers. Things start to go wrong, however; it seems that somebody is beating him to his kills. It also seems that this someone is looking to eliminate Keller. What should have been exciting instead reads like a print version of My Dinner with Andre. There are never any direct action scenes; events are merely discussed after the fact. Keller collects stamps, and many pages are devoted to his hobby, which is fine if you collect stamps. But to be honest, collecting dust would be more appropriate for this book. Purchase only if you need all of Block's novels.
-DJeff Ayers, Seattle P.L.
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Keller seems the archetypal contemporary urban man. He lives a mostly solitary and quotidian existence on Manhattan's East Side. He eats out; he ruminates in Seinfeldian fashion about how to "clean his plate" in a restaurant that trumpets a bottomless coffee cup: every time he empties his cup, a waitress refills it. He works on his stamp collection and goes to jury duty when summoned. Occasionally, he visits Dot in White Plains, then goes to Louisville or Muscatine, Iowa, to murder a stranger. Keller is a contract killer, and Dot is his "broker." Here Keller realizes that someone is stalking him; he and Dot examine it from every angle and conclude that another hit man is pulling a Microsoft--trying to eliminate the competition. Keller's outrage at this unethical behavior recalls the bizarre logic of Catch-22. It's these elements, the twisted logic and the protagonist's relentless introspection about matters great and small, that make Keller stories so winsome. Block is a wonderfully agile writer; along with Keller, he is the creator of hard-boiled P.I. Matt Scudder, charming bibliophile/thief Bernie Rhodenbarr, and secret agent Evan Tanner. Mystery readers are likely to be most familiar with Rhodenbarr and Scudder, but the previous Keller novel, Hit Man (1997), was a top seller, too. If crime fans don't have Keller on their A-lists yet, they're missing a sure thing. Thomas Gaughan
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Edition details

• Publisher: William Morrow
• Publication date: 2000
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0060198338
• ISBN 13: 9780060198336
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 304