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Eddie's Boy

ebook
5 of 6 copies available
5 of 6 copies available
A hit man is called back into action in this explosive thriller from the New York Times bestselling author and “master of nail-biting suspense” (Los Angeles Times).
 
Michael Shaeffer is a retired American businessman, living peacefully in England with his aristocratic wife. But her annual summer party brings strangers to their house, and with them, an attempt on Michael’s life. He is immediately thrust into action, luring his lethal pursuers to Australia before venturing into the lion’s den—the States—to figure out why the mafia is after him again, and how to stop them.
 
Eddie’s Boy jumps between Michael’s current predicament and the past, between the skillset he now ruthlessly and successfully employs and the training that made him what he is. We glimpse the days before he became the Butcher’s Boy, the highly skilled mob hit man who pulled a slaughter job on some double-crossing clients and started a mob war, to his childhood spent apprenticed to Eddie, a seasoned hired assassin. And we watch him pit two prominent mafia families against each other to eliminate his enemies one by one.
 
He’s meticulous in his approach, using his senior contact in the Organized Crime Division of the Justice Department for information, without ever allowing her to get too close to his trail. But will he be able to escape this new wave of young contract killers, or will the years finally catch up to him?
 
As the San Francisco Chronicle said about this Edgar Award-winning series, “The best thing about Thomas Perry’s thrillers are the devilishly ingenious schemes his protagonists devise to outwit their pursuers . . . Perry can really write.”
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    • Kirkus

      September 15, 2020
      Nine years after his comeback appearance in The Informant (2011), the Butcher's Boy returns yet again, and for the usual reason: Because somebody's trying to kill him. Michael Schaeffer, as he's been calling himself now for many years, hardly breaks a sweat dispatching the four hit men who break into his aristocratic wife's Yorkshire home. But an old pro like him realizes they're only the tip of an iceberg, and when his flight to Australia merely makes him the target of a completely new crew of assassins, he realizes that the only way to end such a serpentine plot is to cut off its head. Breaking cover to drop in uninvited on Elizabeth Waring, the Justice Department Organized Crime official who still dreams of turning him into an informant, he learns one fact that could explain why he's suddenly become a person of interest to both feds and organized crime once more: the impending parole hearing of Carlo Balacontano, a career criminal convicted in 1982 of the rare murder he didn't commit. The Butcher Boy, hired by Bala for a routine hit and then placed in the crosshairs by his client because Bala didn't care to pay him, killed Bala's frontman, Arthur Fieldston, and then took exceptional pains to frame Bala for the crime. Has his former client been waiting all these years for revenge? Or are the folks at Justice taking advantage of his possible parole to turn up the heat on Michael Schaeffer? Either way, many more brutally efficient executions are guaranteed. The biggest surprise here is the number of extended flashbacks to the Butcher Boy's apprenticeship to (who else?) the Butcher. Despite the valedictory elements, Perry makes the distant past as vivid and immediate as the relentlessly paced present.

      COPYRIGHT(2020) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

    • Publisher's Weekly

      Starred review from October 5, 2020
      Edgar-winner Perry’s superbly crafted fourth Butcher’s Boy novel (after 2011’s The Informant) opens with retired hit man Michael Schaeffer driving a car with the bodies of three inept assassins he killed earlier that night as they were breaking into the Yorkshire manor house he shares with his wife, Meg. Michael intends to find out who ordered the hit on him, and after saying goodbye to Meg, who’s fully aware of his former profession, he travels to Australia for safety. But when gunmen ambush him there as well, Michael realizes, after eliminating them with ruthless efficiency, that a trip to the States will be necessary to pinpoint the origin of the attacks. In the U.S., he seeks out Justice Department bigwig Elizabeth Waring, who once used him as an informant, and suggests a trade for info about his hunters. It soon becomes clear that the likely instigator is a Mafia don Michael helped send to prison years earlier by framing him for a murder. An immensely clever cat and mouse game he engineers involving Waring and various mob factions ensues. Perry delivers a master class in the art of propulsive tension. Agent: Mel Berger, WME.

    • Booklist

      Starred review from November 1, 2020
      Perry is a master at finding humanity in criminals, especially in his stand-alone thrillers; fortunately, he sometimes brings back these bewitching bad guys, straddling the line between series and stand-alone. Take Michael Shaeffer, hit-man hero of Perry's Edgar-winning debut novel, The Butcher's Boy (1982). This is the third time in 38 years that the spotlight-shunning Shaeffer has emerged from retirement to dispatch another batch of younger hoodlums eager to claim the longstanding price on the Butcher's Boy's head. Shaeffer is enjoying retirement in England with his aristocratic wife when three American mobsters track him down from across the pond. Sure, Shaeffer gets rid of them quickly, but bigger problems lurk: Who's after him and why now, when it appeared that he'd finally dropped off the Mob's radar? To find out, Shaeffer must return to the U.S., where both mobsters and feds await him. In trying to carve a more permanent separate peace, Shaeffer revisits various old haunts, giving Perry the welcome opportunity to reacquaint us with his antihero's surrogate father, Eddie, a loving parent who trained his young charge in killing for hire: ""Those road trips they'd taken to murder someone were what he'd had instead of family vacations."" The irony in that sentence is what makes the Butcher's Boy unlike any other fictional hit man. He's a good son who learned his father's trade and now is trying to unlearn it. Just try not rooting for him.

      COPYRIGHT(2020) Booklist, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

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  • English

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