Customer Reviews

The Hitman Diaries

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Dark and delightful. If think you might enjoy a sort of English Carl Hiaasen this book is for you.

To tell the truth, I borrowed this book from my library because of its cute pink cover - it struck me as weird that a book titled as such would use this colour theme usually meant for those diabetic-inducing novels or whatever is associated with 'cute' book genres! But I never regretted borrowing the book; I fully intend to get it from my bookstore as soon as I can.

Danny King's humour shines through in this book, clearly meant only for those who are able to look at the world in a crooked and morbid view. I feel that it's kinda like in the same vein as 'Kill Bill' (another fantastic movie!) but without all the blood and gore (unless you really go and visualise it all in your mind). But as you read the book further, you start to sympathise with the lead character, Ian Bridges, who only wants to find his leukemia/coma girl while doing his hit jobs for the mob boss JB - which is kinda similar to everyone of us searching for that one great love, ain't it?

Plenty of hilarious and albeit unrealistic (at least to me) and totally fantastic situations but hey it's supposed to be fiction. But Danny King made each character lovable in their own individual way and you start to cheer on Ian's side in his quest for love! If you can't find the ridiculousness in any kind of situation, this is definitely not the book for you.

This book has made me a Danny King fan and now, excuse me while I go get the other two books in the series...

Danny King's the Hitman Diaries, is a narration by Ian Bridges, a London underworld hitman who recounts not only various hits he has makes since the beginning of the story where we pick up his life midway through a date with an overweight newsagent worker which just isn't going the way he thought. You see Ian has been on a lifelong quest to find a girl he could love and who would be grateful for his unconditional love. He wants an attractive girl yes, but preferably with something wrong like a deformity, cancer or something like this so he can stick by her, care for her and she'll know without a doubt that he loves her faults and all. So when his latest date is coming to a disastrous end and a thug and his white trash woman encouraging him on decides to beat him up in the car park he of course instinctively goes into hitman mode to save himself. What follows in the immediate pages is an extremely comical journey to his boat which he uses to dispose of his victims where the body count just keeps rising much to Ian's annoyance.

This is only night one of Ian's tale, which like a share stock graph goes up in down in quality and pace of the story. At times it's brilliant, very funny and even informative. Along for his various hits is very enjoyable as well as his various failed relationships. Then at others Ian gets side tracked by lengthy arguments with his dead mother which don't really add anything to the story and get quite boring at times. If they had been edited out the pace of the story would have flowed a lot better. Still it's hard to put this book down once you start as you do want to know what happens next, and will Ian ever find happiness. Realistic wise it's like lots of machine guns action high body count movie, not believable at all but a lot of fun to experience none the less. I'd definitely check out other novels by Danny King.

Written by a former burglar who renounced his life of crime, got an education, and started a new career as a journalist, Danny King's The Hitman Diaries is a dark novel of the personal life of a professional killer. Most of the women Ian Bridges meets in his line of work end up dead -- until he is thrust in a moral quandary when his next contract happens to be for the one woman who truly loves and understands him. Black humor laced with tangled human realities make for an engaging, offbeat, original, skillfully crafted novel would make one dynamite Hollywood movie!

Just too cruel and raw for my taste. Some of the details are just too descriptive for me. It just went on and on about how to kill and in what awful manner....it never seemed to end.