Billy Summers

I have not read much of Stephen King's work, but this was a well constructed, heart-full interweaving of several stories that had me going to the end of the 783 pages. Billy Summers grew up poor. His mother was continually bringing home bad men. When one of them stomped his younger sister to death in a drunken rage, Billy grabbed the man's gun and shot him. Billy was eventually placed in a foster home, joined the Marines as soon as he could, and went to Iraq after being trained as a sniper. Now he makes his living killing bad men. He won't take a job unless he believes the target is seriously a "bad" person....like the man who killed his sister, Cathy. And Billy is not your ordinary assassin; he loves to read but he hides his light beneath a bushel basket of a "dumb self persona" when dealing with his potential employers. The New York Times' reviewer handily informs us that "Among the authors name-checked in its spacious narrative are Shakespeare, Wordsworth, Dickens, Faulkner, Tim O’Brien, Cormac McCarthy and Robert Stone, along with Billy’s own favorites, Thomas Hardy and Émile Zola." When he agrees to take on one final job with a big payout, his antenna immediately begin to suspect something is off. Nevertheless, Billy is a man of his word and he continues living in a small southern town under an assumed identity, posing as a writer with a deadline. In the process, he makes friends with his neighbors and their children, dates a woman from the building where his "office" is, fertilizes his lawn so it looks really nice, and starts writing a fictionalized account of his life. But the book gets less and less fictionalized as he gets closer to the present day. Billy is no fool and he knows he is being set up somehow, so he makes his own plans for escape after the target is killed. Then he becomes the target--with a $6 million bounty on his head. He risks his own safety by rescuing a young woman who is gang raped and she becomes his traveling companion and--almost and then fully--his accomplice in taking out one last very bad man.  

Publishers Weekly describes the book as a "tripwire-taut thriller."The Guardian says it is "his best book in years." Kirkus concludes "Murder most foul and mayhem most entertaining. Another worthy page-turner from a protean master. "