Customer Reviews

Who is Conrad Hirst?: A Novel

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

 

 

Imagine that you suffer a great loss of a loved one. Your first reaction is numbness: To feel something, you join a war. That experience brutalizes you so that killing soon means nothing. Not surprisingly, you become a hired killer working for a German gangster.

But something happens during your last hit that makes you want to retire. As far as you know, only four people know you are an assassin. Why not eliminate those four and retire to live a better life?

That's the purpose of Conrad Hirst at age 32, after a decade of killing. But Hirst finds that things are not as they seem . . . and everything changes.

This premise is a very interesting one for such a book. I rated the premise as a five. Unfortunately, the resolution of the premise isn't very credible, palatable, or interesting. I rated the execution of that premise as a two. The average is a three.

The author holds back a surprise that's very easy to anticipate but that is intended to be a big revelation. I think the story would have worked better if this revelation had come at the beginning of the book.

I felt that the book's gratuitous killing made me feel dirty. That's not an experience I had hoped to gain by reading this book.

Unless you are desperately hungry for a Jason Bourne-like book that's not nearly as well done, I suggest you skip this book.

As per usual (which is not a negative), Wignall delivers tight, sparse fare that bowls along handsomely without indulgence or distraction. His determination to focus on his protagonists' minds, rather than their hardware (as so many do), elevates the work from workaday to thought-provoking.

Sure, the wont of fieldcraft may irk; but it's soon forgotten and we continually wonder how Hirst will extricate himself from his predicament. The plot twist toward the end is effective and, for my part, unforeseen.

The reader first meets Conrad Hirst at a point when he has been a hired killer for ten years [he is now 32 years old], having killed, by his best estimation, dozens of men and three women. Something about his last "assignment" has filled him with revulsion for what he has become, and he vows to end that persona immediately. He converses in his head with his lost love, Anneke, who died in the war in Yugoslavia from which he ran after her death, straight into his "profession." But now, "the Klemperer job changed everything--he understood that now. Perhaps for the first time ever, as much as Conrad tried to suppress it, he feared what he didn't know about the world, and most of all, he feared what he didn't know about himself."

Accomplishing this will be no easy task, and he determines that in order to erase who he is, there must be four final killings: Frank, his handler; Fabio, his document forger; Freddie, his arms dealer; and Julius Eberhardt, his employer, the German crime boss who had hired him all those years ago. He feels he needs to leave "with the right blood on his hands." The first of these is done easily, and he shoots Frank. But before he dies, Frank utters these words: "I lied..." About what? "Everything." He gets an inkling of the meaning of these cryptic words when he soon approaches Eberhardt to kill him, and is aghast to see that Eberhardt is not the man who hired him as his personal assassin a decade earlier. It is obvious that the first thing he must do is find out the identity of the man for whom he has been killing people. But then others start dying. And his new priority, beyond reinventing himself and leaving the killing behind, is to discover who is now doing the killing, before he himself becomes a victim.

The author, born in Belgium and now living in England, with this, his fourth mystery novel, has created a fascinating protagonist with whom the reader cannot help but feel sympathy. Well, almost. The book is well-written, filled with surprises and suspense, and is recommended

Conrad Hirst is a nice, bright young Englishman whose most interesting feature is his lack of compunction about killing people. He's not driven to kill, but at the same time, he has no scruples about doing it, as long as he gets paid. And for twelve years somebody has been paying him to knock off various folks here and there. As the book opens, we learn that an event has disturbed this orderly life, leading him to decide to give up his career. He thinks his retirement can succeed only if he kills the four people he believes can identify him as a killer. But as he goes about wiping them out, he finds that significantly more than four people have been involved in directing his activities. The question of what was this life-altering event is finally answered in the epilogue -- a scene that might have worked as well in its proper chronological spot as in flashback. I suggest you leave it till last and decide for yourself.

I was hooked from the moment I picked up this book. It is a great, fast read and keeps you entralled. I would recommend heavily.

At first I rated this book as a middle-ranking thriller. And I bought simply because it had been reviewed in "The Economist". It sticks in your head a bit simply as an effort at making an unlovely character sympathetic. I still wonder about the coda at the end. It's a major plot point that could have been right at the front. But those are the choices an author makes.

I stopped reading two-thirds of the way through, after enduring the shockingly amateurish Chapter Thirteen. Could the author be troubled to do an afternoon's worth of research? How about a second draft? For one example out of dozens, it is not necessary to say that the hero remained 'completely silent' - the word 'silent' will do.

Conrad Hirst kills old men and schoolteachers. Four times at least he murders unarmed prisoners who pose no threat to him. He is emotionally immature and a moral cretin, qualities which the author seems to find endearing. Hirst has no inkling of spycraft. His behavior is consistently idiotic. Luckily, his adversaries are morons, too.

For some reason, this book has received good reviews from good writers. But be warned: it is awful.

Who is Conrad Hirst? He is a hitman who has killed scores of people for German crime boss Julius Eberhardt. Now at thirty-two after killing old Klemperer he realizes he doesn't want to kill anymore. He knows only four people who knows who he is and what he has done; his handler Frank Dillon, Eberhardt, arms dealer Freddie Fischer and forger Fabio Gaddi. He plans to kill them all and walk away into the sunset.

As Frank is dying, he tells his killer Conrad that all these years together he lied to him. He isn't sure what that means until he goes to see Eberhardt and sees he isn't the man who recruited him almost a decade ago. He realizes Frank was serving two masters but he doesn't know who the second master was. Freddie and Fabio have disappeared and are perhaps dead, two womenl have taken an unusual interest in him and spooks are spying on him. Conrad believe if he can't walk away by convincing whoever is really in charge he is no threat, he will go down in a blaze of glory.

Conrad was a damaged young man when he was recruited; he has healed and he finally knows it. Readers will feel sorry for him even though he never asked questions about who he was killing and why or that he believed he worked for a crime boss. The question of who Conrad's handlers really are will keep readers turning the pages of this mesmerizing crime thriller. The antagonist comes across like a little boy waking up from a terrible nightmare.

Harriet Klausner

Not very convincing, expected more, could make a good movie though (something like No Country for Old Man).