My rating: 3 of 5 stars
There isn’t much new here in Hit List, as compared to Hit Man. You can decide for yourself if that’s a good thing or not. For me, if I like something, I’ll probably like more of the same, so I don’t need Hit List to be more than, for all intents and purposes, just the second half of Hit Man. My understanding is that, like the first book, this second is a collection of shorter works that were published independently, and so this is not a “novel” in the strictest sense of the word. There’s some character development, but of the “reveal” variety, not the “evolve” variety. Keller is still killing people, or not, for reasons that are, if not strictly morally, at least not merely sociopathic. Keller does what he does. He’s as bland as toast.
If you’re not satisfied with merely more of the same, well, at least in this book there’s Keller’s stamp collection. There’s his ninety-nine mile distance from what was his previous one-hundred-mile existentialism. There’s his toying with some new-age sensibilities, which are as perfunctory and inconsequential as any other thought he might have. Keller is dull, life is dull, death is extremely dull.
And somehow, the book is not. Not really sure how else to say it. This is what happens when a comfortable, well-experienced master of words like Lawrence Block sits down to just do what he does. Not every book has to be pyrotechnics and deeply emotional. Most of existence isn’t. If you need your novels to be written by men who eventually kill themselves, don’t bother. But if you just want to read something for a while, where some folks get killed, go right ahead, read Hit List.