This is the second Keller I've read, after "All the flowers are dying". There is a loose narrative stream between Keller's "jobs" as a hit man but many of them can be read almost as stand-alones (I imagine some could almost be pieces in, say "The New Yorker" and then pulled together into a book.[return][return]Enjoyable, but also prefer Scudder or Bernie! (and reading in the front cover I realise how many Blocks I havent even found yet!)

The plot is too full of coincidences, makes it all seam so contrived. ( )

Keller's cold, but he's no sociopath. Not sure how he'll hold up in a full-length novel, but I'm going to find out in the next book. ( )

After reading the first two books in this series, this one is repetitive. ( )

This is the third collection of stories about Block's Hit Man Keller. The first collection of stories, "Hit Man" was excellent (4 stars). The second collection "Hit List" was not nearly as good (2 stars). I'd say that the 3rd collection is a bit better than the 2nd but still lacks the punch that the first group of stories had. Block retreads many things we have seen before and does constant recapping of events within a couple stories as if the reader had forgotten what happened 20 pages before. If the information was material to what was about to happen then a bit of it would be understandable, but frequently it is just conversation filler with his contact "Dot". The sparkle in the conversations between Dot and Keller just isn't there as much and that detracts from these stories. This constant recapping of history caused the 2nd collection to suffer as well. When these stories are assembled into a novel format it would improve them to spend some editing time to remove the extraneous duplicate material that slows the stories down, and weakens them when put together.

Still, these are enjoyable light reading and can be read a few chapters at a time for a story and then set aside to pick up later. Keller's stamp collecting hobby which figures in some stories is always a kick for me to read and reminds me of my collecting days many years ago. Despite being a killer, Keller has his own moral code of sorts, and sorting that out inside his head is interesting. Some of the jobs he is hired for challenge him and have twists such as when he is sent to kill a fellow stamp collector. He didn't want to do the job and he liked the guy a lot. He was a friend. Frequently though, Keller doesn't really want to know much about the intended victim other than what is needed to get the job done. So the reader never knows if a particular job is going to be quick and clean or lead to something else entirely - which happens sometimes when Keller digs a little deeper into things. The dog story in here was like that where Keller got just a little too close to everything and it was one of the best in a very twisty way.

There are two more books in the series and I will be reading them. ( )