Hit men in crime fiction are nothing new. Even hit men with a conscience—the kind who feel something other than glee, the kind who feel something at all when they pull the trigger—aren’t a revelation. But a hit man who only kills other hit men? That’s original. Chris Holm’s whip-smart tale of a different kind of professional killer moves as fast as the bullets fired by his hero, Special Forces vet Michael Hendricks, and with wit as dry as the Afghani desert where Hendricks allegedly died. Only his best, and only, friend, fellow soldier Lester Meyers, knows that Hendricks is still alive and that he’s taken up an unusual occupation.
Hendricks isn’t a contract killer, not quite. Contract killers murder innocent people for money. Like Robin Hood with a higher body count and a sniper rifle, Hendricks takes out contract killers before they can complete their missions. He contacts potential victims and offers his protection from whatever gory fate is about to befall them.
When Hendricks foils, with skill befitting his time in the military, a hit on a wealthy Miami businessman, he not only kills a hit man with an impressively lethal résumé, but also draws the attention of a dangerous group of men. Known as the Council, the group consists of representatives from all of America’s major crime families, from the Italians to the Russians and everything in between. This is not the first time Hendricks has scuttled one of the Council’s plans, but this time the members are fed up. And whom do you call to take out a hit man who took out your hit man? Another hit man, of course.
If Hendricks kills because he can’t “help but try and make things right, one murder at a time,” the man sent to kill him is very different. Alexander Engelmann, a Swiss killer with a black hole where his heart should be, is as ruthless as Hendricks is principled, and now he’s on Hendricks’ trail.
No bad guy story—even a bad guy story with a bad guy who’s bad for good reasons—is complete without a good guy, or in this case, a good woman, on his heels. Too often when a writer hits his or her stride with a complicated and realistically flawed character, the rest of the cast come across as afterthoughts, shadows of stereotypes needed to fill up space on the page until the hero, or anti-hero, can take center stage again. Holm avoids that problem with FBI Special Agent Charlotte “Charlie” Thompson, a character as compelling and real as the “ghost”—her name for Hendricks—she’s chasing. Thompson is good at her job without falling into the worn trope of the female law enforcement officer who’s so competent that she alienates her fellow cops or agents.
Holm creates and maintains real suspense throughout as Hendricks finds himself in increasingly dangerous situations with increasingly higher odds of dying.
That, perhaps, is the greatest strength of a character like Hendricks: he is a broken man who never pretends to be anything else. He’s not a sadist like Engelmann, who revels in the pain he causes. Hendricks can’t help but care because what’s broken inside him, ironically, makes him better at his job. When a target he’s protecting is in trouble, during one of the book’s tensest scenes set in a claustrophobic casino ballroom, Hendricks fears for the man’s safety, even when his own life is at risk: “That fact shouldn’t have mattered to him. If he were half as cold-blooded as he thought he was, it wouldn’t have.” But it does matter and that, in the end, is reason enough to root for a man who kills for a living.