But first there is one last hit.īilly is among the best snipers in the world, a decorated Iraq war vet, a Houdini when it comes to vanishing after the job is done. He's a killer for hire and the best in the business.īut he'll do the job only if the target is a truly bad guy. 1 bestseller Stephen King, whose 'restless imagination is a power that cannot be contained' ( The New York Times Book Review ), comes a thrilling new novel about a good guy in a bad job.īilly Summers is a man in a room with a gun. Here, the creation of fiction is precisely what Billy Summers is about.From legendary storyteller and No. Throughout his career, King has frequently featured characters who are writers (as in Misery and The Dark Half), but such elements were not necessarily crucial to the plot. Then the lighter fell out of his fingers and the cigarette fell out of his mouth.”) Jassim’s knitted hat flew off and at first I thought I’d missed him, maybe only by an inch, but when you’re sniping, an inch might as well be a mile… He just stood there with the cigarette between his lips. The recoil hit the hollow of my shoulder. We are handed such frisson-inducing set-pieces with satisfying regularity (“I squeezed the trigger. There are piquant echoes throughout of earlier works – one episode is reminiscent of the Overlook hotel from The Shining with its unreal inhabitants: a Colorado setting and a hint of the supernatural.Īnd no Stephen King novel would be complete without scarifying bursts of violence. As well as being a reader of serious fiction and trying to write the great American novel, the lethal Billy suffers from PTSD and is as complex a character as anyone in the King canon. It is as if King is providing bonus material for all the academic theses written on his work, doing the homework in advance for students. Billy assumes the mantle of a novelist, engaged in writing his own autobiography (which, unsurprisingly, strays from the truth – but the truth, Billy decides, is to be discerned through fiction).
Lowbrow stuff this is not: King is alerting us to a literary strand in his thriller.
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