Most unique assassin I’ve read. You’re not really sure… about anything as he surprises and re-surprises with every page turn. Framing God for a murder? It’s all part of the deal - kill and blame someone else. Interesting idea.

Now this is an interesting premise.

Michael Harrier (with any number of aliases) is a gun for hire. Quite good at it. The book opens

up with him in sniper mode in Africa. A squad of big game hunters have teamed up with

poachers to do some hunting off the books, off the reservation. Endangered? Who cares.

Harrier lines the poachers and the hunters up in his sights and picks them off one-by-one,

leaving one survivor (on purpose). For a healthy paycheck. From whom? He doesn’t care. Did

his research, took the job, killed the targets, left the survivor who will eventually get blamed for

the carnage.

Part 1:

You see, Harrier’s corner of the hired assassin market is that he only takes jobs where he is

supplied with two names: the TV (target victim) and the SV (surviving victim). The TV is

obvious. The SV is who gets framed for the murder.

Harrier’s next job (for which he’ll get $3 million) seems like an impossible task. Kill a known (but

never ‘convicted’) pedophile priest (the TV) and blame God (the SV) for the priest’s untimely

death. He’s been hired by a father whose adult son was repeatedly abused by the priest when

his son was serving as the parrish alter boy years earlier, but the assaults were never proven

by the police or the Catholic church despite intense investigations.

That’s the setup. Killing the priest is a chinch. Framing God is an altogether more difficult

assignment. Harrier investigates the priest and studies how death is portrayed in the Bible.

After considerable research into Old and New Testament descriptions, he comes up with a

plan. A plan that leaves virtually no possible clues that God, not a man, killed the priest.

Once he puts his plan into play, Harrier has to confront the priest first. The interaction between

Harrier and the priest as the scene is set up is a wonderful exchange of not necessarily good

and evil, they both are evil, but of how the plan was developed from both a practical and

religious perspective.

Part 2:

The next stage of any plan like this is to get away with it. Once the first part of the assignment

is completed (the first half of the book), the priest is dead and the media is swarming like flies

on manure, the police assign Jordan Becker, their most experienced detective, who also is just

digging out from under an internal affairs investigation, to unravel this complex case.

Taking down the killer and making sense of the God angle could just be Becker’s own chance

at redemption in his own life and work. There are sparse clues to speak of and what he finds

upends each succeeding step. Every inch forward sends Becker back well past where he

began. More than once, Becker begins to believe that he has met his match in this priest killer.

As so often happens, when an investigation continues to fail, the only way to capture the killer

is to get down in the sewer of darkness where such targets exist.

Some premise, right? The author takes us on a roller coaster ride where good and evil exist in

tandem. Is there a ‘winner’ here? Lessons to be learned? Characters that may be part of an

ongoing series?

Probably not,

Despite the lack of a clear good guy/bad guy. There’s no black and white, only gray. Lots of

gray. But there is one clear winner: the reader who picks up this book.

Such a great read. First off is the unique origin story, this assassin is not ex-military or ex-government. Very realistically drawn and a review of the acknowledgments page explains why. The story has an intertwined plot with sharp dialogue, several layers and surprises here. The framing of God was convincingly done, and I had my doubts going in (I would make this aspect more prominent in the book description because it was a surprise).
This is one I’ll reread. Thank you NetGalley for a complimentary copy of this book.