This was a mixed experience for me. On one hand you have Keller, hard-boiled assassin for hire that gets framed with high profile kill and forced to run. And nothing, just run.

First half of the book is Keller on a scout mission for his latest work, he gets framed and then he runs. But he is not running like he has cops closing on at him - no he eludes his pursuers (shown pretty good how cool and skill can be of great help here) and he gets himself on the run from one place to another.
And he runs.... main goal is to run and nothing else. He runs for days (if I got everything correct even months). And he runs.... And it gets somewhat tiresome but he just keeps running.

Finally he meets a lady and is life turns for better but again nothing happens - now he lives normally, disguised as much as possible but nothing else happens.

So we are talking about a hard man, very proficient at what he does who gets framed, loses all possession he has, has his closest friends killed in a most gruesome way and he does not even think about revenge? At all? Feels slightly out of character, does not it.

Finally twist occurs and he has a conversation and somebody says - "Hey those b******s deserve to die!" and he goes "Hmmmm, sounds kinda cool", does his job and story ends.

I can get that main character is maybe tired of his hired-gun life but I cannot fathom that anybody could get so out-of-character and not even think about getting their hands on those that framed him.

As I said - mixed experience. Nevertheless it is good crime/action novel and if you enjoy these give it a shot - maybe you'll see something I missed and everything will have more sense :)
( )

You can tell from the moment the protagonist learns of the assassination what is going to happen. And then it predictably happens. OK, his shacking up with some random lady from New Orleans is unexpected but everything else falls in line. ( )

If you used a cell phone, they could pinpoint the location of it when you made the call. They kept building better mousetraps, and the mice had to be correspondingly more resourceful. Lately, whenever he had a job, he would buy two prepaid cell phones for cash from a store on West Twenty- third Street, making up a name and address for their records. He'd give one to Dot and keep the other for himself, and the only calls either would make were to each other. He'd called a few days ago, to report his arrival in Des Moines, and he'd called earlier that morning to say that they'd told him to wait at least one more day, although he could have hit the guy and been on his way home by now.

Keller gets framed. Keller gets away. Keller gets even. This entire book was so unnecessary that it became super fun. I felt like Block is having a ball here. ( )

This is the 4th book in the author's Keller series. Keller is a hit man for hire, but very different than what you might normally run across. The first three books were short stories loosely put together as novels and as a result there was a lot of repetition and things didn't always flow so well. Nevertheless I liked the preceding books. This book is the first that feels written as a novel. We get to dive deeper into character without it being repeated which is really nice. I thought we were going to have the first "great" Keller novel but one thing in the story pretty much killed that thought. Keller's partner 'Dot' does something really disturbing and disgusting. I won't say more except that the event almost spoiled the book for me. Still I liked it more than not and think this was the best Keller book yet. I was also pretty happy with how it ended. The series could have, maybe should have ended here with this 2008 book but one more came out, "Hit Me" in 2013 which I think I will read soon. Then I think we'll be done. ( )