Hit List, by
Lawrence Block, is a story of a professional hitman, John Keller, for whom things gradually begin to go wrong. Whereas most of his contracts have run smoothly, a few begin to take a strange twist whereby people loosely connected to Keller die and he begins to doubt that these are coincidences. After a few close incidents he realizes that someone is out to get him and he is eventually forced to go on the trail of the hitman who is trying to assassinate him.
Whilst the premise of this story is interesting and is engaging for parts of the book it largely misses the opportunity for some rather dark humour. Although the plot is fairly interesting the book is woefully padded out with a large amount of barely relevant incidents such as Keller doing jury duty and an unacceptable amount of banal dialogue which becomes very irritating after a while.
