Book Review: Hit List by Lawrence Block

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.

Despite the many bad points of this novel, the character of Keller is an interesting one who is developed quite considerably, he is a regular guy with some quite mundane hobbies, and the plot, although short, does make the reader want to find out what the conclusion will be. Unfortunately, the twist is so obvious that I could see it coming way before the end and as such the ending was quite a disappointment.

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This book is okay to pass the time with; an easy holiday read that requires very little concentration. The interesting plot idea and lead character, it isn't a complete waste of time, but don't go out of the way to buy it.

Score: 5.5/10