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Type of bind: Mass Market Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 813.54
EAN num: 9780061030994
ISBN number: 0061030996
Label: HarperTorch
Manufacturer: HarperTorch
Quantity: 1
Page Count: 384
Printing Date: February 01, 2002
Publishing house: HarperTorch
Release Date: February 05, 2002
Sale Popularity Level: 298393
Studio: HarperTorch
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Product Description:
Keller is a regular guy. He goes to the movies, works on his stamp collection. Call him for jury duty and he serves without complaint. Then every so often he gets a phone call from White Plains that sends him flying off somewhere to kill a perfect stranger. Keller is a pro and very good at what he does. But the jobs have started to go wrong. The realization is slow coming yet, when it arrives, it is irrefutable: Someone out there is trying to hit the hit man. Keller, God help him, has found his way onto somebody else's hit list.
Amazon.com Review:
Few mystery authors have a stable of protagonists as uniformly appealing as Lawrence Block's. Whether Block's taking the reader into PI Matthew Scudder's world of dimly lit bars and basement AA meetings, quirky burglar Bernie Rhodenbarr's used bookstore, or the international hot-spot hangouts of Evan Tanner, the spy who never sleeps, he always provides good company. John Keller, star of Block's 1998 story collection Hit Man, is a typical Block invention: an unassuming, get-the-job-done-and-move-on New York contract killer who collects stamps, does the morning crossword, eats Vietnamese takeout, and falls for the occasional woman.
When Keller gets off a plane in Louisville, ready to do the job he's been hired for, something about it feels wrong from the start. And when two people are killed in the motel room he's just vacated, he realizes he narrowly missed a setup, but can't figure out why. Then he goes to Boston to do another job, and afterwards dines in a coffee shop where another patron has the misfortune of leaving with Keller's raincoat: The Globe didn't have it. But there it was in the Herald, a small story on a back page, a man found dead on Boston Common, shot twice in the head with a small-caliber weapon.
Keller could picture the poor bastard, lying face-down on the grass, the rain washing relentlessly down on him. He could picture the dead man's coat, too. The Herald didn't say anything about a coat, but that didn't matter. Keller could picture it all the same.
Keller's agent, Dot, puts the pieces--including the death of another contract killer she books occasionally--together and comes up with the seemingly crazy idea that a greedy hit man is knocking off the competition. In between other legit hits, romancing a commitment-shy artist, visiting an astrologer, and a long stint on jury duty, Keller slowly moves closer to the faceless nemesis he and Dot dub 'Roger.' But it's Dot, the woman of action, who figures out what to do about him. Though Hit List is too introspective to be a caper novel, and too funny to be noir, it's bound to find a rapt audience with fans of both subgenres. After two such engaging books, can Hit Parade be far behind? --Barrie Trinkle
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Rated by buyers 
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Typical Lawrence Block. Funny, interesting dialogue, interspersed with bits of a story. This time, however, the plot took too long to get into, and even with the great dialogue, I found myself bored for much of the time.
Rated by buyers -
I found the introduction to John Keller in Hit Man to be mildly entertaining. I read the novel in less than a day and had only minor qualms about its content. In contrast, Hit List took me over a week to finish and I couldn't help but stop and make mental notes of things that just didn't sit right with me.
The pacing of the story is very off. Things move along so slowly that I found myself counting how many pages were left in almost any given chapter. While the end builds nicely and is probably the only part of the book that approaches being a page-turner, it peters out so unremarkably that the last chapter feels like the wrap up to a Scooby-Doo episode. Especially off-putting is the part where Dot and Keller talk their way into understanding the antagonist and his motivation - that's the closest the reader will get to a characterization of him.
Most of the details and events that happen in Hit List are just plain boring. How anticlimatic is it to have numerous hits in a row end in a bizzare twist of fate? Who really gives a damn about Keller's stamp collection (the only part of Hit Man that had me wishing the pages read even faster)? An astrologer, really? What was the point of the chapters devoted to being on that jury? Also, the expository, dumbed-down conversations between Keller and Dot are more often annoying than not. How excited is a reader supposed to be about the chief conflict of a novel if the anti-hero himself remarks that he hasn't really thought about it in weeks?
It's the same old Keller here, but that may be the very problem. It seems as if Block has added nothing new to the character since the previous installment. References to the previous work are sprinkled throughout but wouldn't detract from a reader's understanding if this was the very first Keller novel he or she read. The conversations with Dot, the philately, and even the sexual romps are all familiar things from the very first book. But we've seen it all before, except with more interesting circumstances, more challenging hits, and less arbitrary people and situations thrown between the end of the book and whichever page the reader might happen to be at.
Rated by buyers 
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This is what happens when a succesfull author of many, many books has to write another one. Simply Dreadfull! There is hardly any story and 9/10ths of the book is filler!
Rated by buyers 
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Lawrence Block is one of those guys who apparently write at the speed of sound, or something. He's now got three series that I know of going, the dark but interesting Matt Scudder private eye series, Bernie Rhodenbarr, the burglar turned used bookstore owner, and of course the series starring Keller, the hit man with mundane everyday problems. This book, Hit List, is second in the series, and it takes up (sort of) where the very first one left off.
Keller's an average guy. He does most anything that other, average people do. He collects stamps (something he picked up in the very first book after someone told him he needed a hobby). He does the Sunday Crossword. He even goes and does jury duty, and when he's on the jury he has a fling with one of the other jurors, at the same time trying to be honest about whether he thinks the accused person's guilty of the crime he's been accused of. The only thing unusual about Keller is that he kills people for a living. He flies someplace, looks around, and when he sees an opportunity, he kills the person. The very first book was really a short story collection, and had an episodic quality to it that, for better or worse, is lacking here. This book was obviously written as a novel to start, because Keller's victims aren't the only ones dying: someone's trying to kill Keller, and getting unlucky. Of course if Keller can't figure out who the guy is, and stop him, then this is going to be a very short series of books.
Block writes different books. The Scudder series is very hardboiled. Rhodenbarr by comparison is pretty light-hearted. The Keller series is more of a very dark comedy. The idea of a killer who collects stamps and winds up on *your* jury is just too weird, if you see what I mean. I enjoy the series, the mundane conversations he has with Dot (who gives him the assignments), the girlfriends he picks up and the stamps he gets. There is an element of suspension of disbelief (everyone Keller kills just dies, but when someone tries to kill Keller, incredible coincidences interfere with the other guy's plans), but it's fun anyway. I enjoyed this book and would recommend it and the very first one in the series, provided you think you can enjoy a book this morally disengaged.
Rated by buyers -
An average plumber has a more interesting life than this hit man.
What a waste.
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