Agent: Chuck Verrill, Darhansoff & Verrill. 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. Mercedes (an Edgar Award winner for Best Novel and a television series streaming on Peacock). Matters get complicated when a rape victim whose life he saves becomes his confidante and a participant in his plans to get even. His recent work includes Fairy Tale, Billy Summers, If It Bleeds, The Institute, Elevation, The Outsider, Sleeping Beauties (cowritten with his son Owen King), and the Bill Hodges trilogy: End of Watch, Finders Keepers, and Mr. But he rightly smells something fishy in the promised $2 million payout and runs rogue when things go south with his employers. 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.
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