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Who is Conrad Hirst?: A Novel
 
 
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Who is Conrad Hirst?: A Novel (Paperback)

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Key Phrases: rogue agent, Kevin Wignall, Alice Benning, Frank Dillon (more...)
3.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (9 customer reviews)
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Who is Conrad Hirst?: A Novel + For the Dogs: A Novel + People Die
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Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

British author Wignall (For the Dogs) successfully channels Robert Ludlum in this lean, muscular thriller with more than a few parallels to Ludlum's Jason Bourne series. Conrad Hirst, a remorseless European hit man burnt out by a life of violence, plans to walk away from the business by eliminating the only four people who know his identity. Of course, it isn't that simple. Hirst's first target, Frank Dillon, admits as he's dying that he has lied to Hirst consistently about Hirst's true employer. Later, Hirst learns that the man he thought was his employer, German crime boss Julius Eberhardt, was only using Eberhardt's identity and may in fact be connected with the CIA. Hirst's ignorance of most tradecraft is a little less than plausible, as is his naïvete in trusting the attractive women he meets just as his plan hits high gear. Still, Wignall's ability to blend meaningful characterizations with suspenseful action shows a talent that many other genre writers would envy. A film, to be directed by Liam Kan and Grant Hodgson, is in the works. (Nov.)
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From Booklist

British assassin Conrad Hirst wants out of the killing business. But four sinister associates must be eliminated before he can embark on a new life. He guns down one; the others turn up either missing or dead. All along, Conrad thought he was working for a German crime boss; is it possible that his paychecks are being cut by the CIA? Conrad's instincts tell him to trust no one, including the smart, sexy French woman he encounters along the way. With each anxiety-ridden day, he sees his dream of a peaceful existence slipping away. Wignall (For the Dogs, 2004) writes eloquently about criminals with a conscience, weaving together Conrad's precarious pursuit of "retirement" with his poignant (and, at times, maudlin) letters to a dead lover. Clipped prose drives this lean tale about a man less likely to go out with a whimper than a bang. "He'd experienced enough to know that survival wasn't an end in itself, that it was better to die trying to live than not live at all." Block, Allison
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Product Details

  • Paperback: 240 pages
  • Publisher: Simon & Schuster; First Edition. 1 in number line edition (November 13, 2007)
  • Language: English
  • ISBN-10: 1416540725
  • ISBN-13: 978-1416540724
  • Product Dimensions: 8.1 x 5.4 x 0.4 inches
  • Shipping Weight: 1.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
  • Average Customer Review: 3.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (9 customer reviews)
  • Amazon.com Sales Rank: #711,392 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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More About the Author

Kevin Wignall
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Front Cover | First Pages | Back Cover | Surprise Me!
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rogue agent
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Kevin Wignall, Alice Benning, Frank Dillon, Bill Rutherford, Lewis Jones, Julius Eberhardt, Fabio Gaddi, Cold War, Conrad Hirst, Freddie Fischer, Hans Klemperer, Die Alpenrose, Signor Gaddi, Herr Klemperer, The Economist
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Customer Reviews

9 Reviews
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Average Customer Review
3.6 out of 5 stars (9 customer reviews)
 
 
 
 
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5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars More quality from Wignall, January 22, 2008
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.
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5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars Exit Plan, December 28, 2007
By Gloria Feit (Long Beach, NY) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   
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
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3 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars How Can a Hit Man Retire?, February 19, 2008
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.
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Most Recent Customer Reviews

5.0 out of 5 stars Hooked from the beginning
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.
Published 9 months ago by Lucien Black

4.0 out of 5 stars Intelligent page-turner whose outcome is not all that foreseen
Conrad Hirst is a nice, bright young Englishman whose most interesting feature is his lack of compunction about killing people. Read more
Published 11 months ago by Keith Nichols

2.0 out of 5 stars Fell short of expectations
Not very convincing, expected more, could make a good movie though (something like No Country for Old Man).
Published 19 months ago by A. Poberezhsky

4.0 out of 5 stars Interesting
At first I rated this book as a middle-ranking thriller. And I bought simply because it had been reviewed in "The Economist". Read more
Published 22 months ago by L. J. C. Wise

1.0 out of 5 stars Bad Novel Alert
I stopped reading two-thirds of the way through, after enduring the shockingly amateurish Chapter Thirteen. Read more
Published 23 months ago by lyle

5.0 out of 5 stars mesmerizing crime thriller
Who is Conrad Hirst? He is a hitman who has killed scores of people for German crime boss Julius Eberhardt. Read more
Published on October 30, 2007 by Harriet Klausner

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