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For the Dogs: A Novel Paperback – June 26, 2007
| Kevin Wignall (Author) Find all the books, read about the author, and more. See search results for this author |
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Lucas is ruthless, brutal, and cold.
Think again.
Ella is bitter, determined, and dangerous.
Lucas is vulnerable and lovelorn.
Ella Hatto is on vacation in Italy with her boyfriend.
It's a beautiful summer evening in a small Tuscan town, and her life is all about the things she doesn't know.
She doesn't know her family is dead.
She doesn't know she's being watched, or that she's in danger.
She doesn't know how rich she is or the murky truth of where that money came from.
She doesn't know that a man is about to cross the street, ending her old life forever.
When Lucas, a retired contract killer, agrees to help her avenge her family's death, Ella is drawn into a world she cannot control, a world from which Lucas wants only to escape.
For the Dogs is a stunning thriller in which avenging the past becomes a deadly business that never ends.
- Print length224 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherSimon & Schuster
- Publication dateJune 26, 2007
- Dimensions5.5 x 0.6 x 8.44 inches
- ISBN-101416568123
- ISBN-13978-1416568124
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About the Author
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Seventeen-year-old boys die in car crashes, they die of meningitis, rare forms of cancer, suicide. Mostly, they don't die at all. They pass through the age, shedding awkwardness and anger and self-loathing on the way.
Ben Hatto was a seventeen-year-old close to bursting with anger. He was angry with his parents for stifling just about every plan he'd had for the summer ahead, angry with his sister, too, for spending the second successive summer traveling with someone from college, angry with school and life and everything else.
There was no teen awkwardness about him, but he made up for it in self-loathing, centered at the moment on his hopeless infatuation with Alice Shaw, a girl completely out of his league, who thought of him as a friend if she thought of him at all. And today someone had asked him outright if he had a crush on her, and that's where he was now, one feeble panicky denial away from total social humiliation.
He lay on his bed as the light faded, head propped up on a pillow, headphones with metal pounding, holding the world at bay. He'd eaten early, pasta. His parents had probably just finished their own dinner downstairs, hardly aware that he was even in the house with them.
His eyes were closed and he was thinking how he'd just have to ignore Alice completely through the final couple of weeks. If one person suspected something, so would others and he'd become a laughing stock. So he'd play it cool with her, and over the summer he'd get his act together and then maybe it wouldn't seem so ridiculous that he liked someone that beautiful. Maybe.
It was something he could believe in for as long as he lay there, that he could be good-looking enough, cool enough, interesting enough for someone like her, that he could speak to her and say what he wanted to say, what he felt, and not the mess of words that actually came out. Lying there he could be everything he needed to be.
The trouble came when he left the security of his room, the posters, music, books, as though his personality was locked up in those familiar surroundings. He just wished for once that he could walk out of there, leave the house and not have everything fall apart, to be able to express himself, to be cool.
A track ended, and in the two-second digital hush he heard his door open. He kept his eyes closed, let the next track explode into his ears, wanting whoever it was just to go away. Then for one hopeful moment he imagined it being someone other than his parents -- it was crazy, but if she were to come there, she might get to know him for who he really was, and then things might be different.
He opened his eyes. It wasn't one of his parents. It took him another second or two to take in the man standing there. Ben didn't know who it was and couldn't work out the expression on the stranger's face, either, one of regret, or like someone about to break bad news.
Their eyes met. Confused, Ben reached up to take off the headphones. The stranger lifted his arm swiftly at the same time, and the headphones were still in place, the music still pounding, when Ben felt something hit him hard on the head.
That was the last thing he felt, because Ben Hatto had just become a statistic in a subgroup almost entirely his own, seventeen-year-old boys killed in their own homes by professional hit men.
The killer made his way back down the stairs, bypassing the kitchen where Pamela Hatto lay on the floor in front of the open dishwasher, her blood speckled across the freshly rinsed dishes she'd been stacking.
He passed through the hallway, stepping carefully over the pool of Mark Hatto's blood that had crept and expanded across the tile floor in the few minutes since he'd shot him. He eased the front door shut behind him, got back in his car, and drove away.
The house he left was silent, the only noise the faint tinny racket of Ben's headphones, a false life sign, like the lights that were on here and there around the place. From the outside that's how it looked, like nothing was wrong, an affluent family home at peace on a summer's evening.
That affluence was visible too in the distance between the Hattos' house and those of their neighbors, the growing number of lights isolated from each other in the lightly wooded garden landscape. This wealth was private, unobtrusive, the kind that would leave the deaths unnoticed for the night, the dead undisturbed.
But an earth tremor had taken place here, and however slowly, the shock waves would ripple out from the epicenter of the Hatto household, undermining the stability of people's lives at ever greater distances.
A few hundred yards away their immediate neighbors were going about their own business, oblivious of the ghoulish adrenaline rush that would sweep them all up in the next twenty-four hours as the legion of TV crews, journalists and photographers would make this quiet neighborhood its own.
Further off, but still less than two miles away, the Shaw family was enjoying a barbecue with friends. Alice was there; happy, a little drunk on red wine, unaware that her feelings for Ben Hatto, confused as they were, would soon take on a lifelong significance, a mantle of sadness and regret and lost opportunity.
Five miles away in the nearest town, the CID unit had no idea they were about to have their first murder case in two years. Nor could they yet know who'd been living among them, or that within twenty-four hours they'd be announcing to the media that Mark Hatto's business affairs had been "complex," a shorthand way of telling the public not to worry, that this guy had brought it upon himself.
And thousands of miles away, in a small town in Italy, the place where the true force of the tremor would be measured, a daughter, a sister, someone the police would need to contact to break the tragic news. And too late, it would be the detective who turned off Ben Hatto's music who realized that perhaps the boy's sister was also in danger.
He'd stand there dwelling on the pointlessness of it, the fact that the kid clearly hadn't disturbed anyone, that the killer had known he was there, sought him out. And he alone would realize that this feud was total and that Ella Hatto, wherever she was, if she was still alive, was perhaps in as much danger as if she'd been in this house herself.
Copyright © 2004 by Kevin Wignall
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Product details
- Publisher : Simon & Schuster (June 26, 2007)
- Language : English
- Paperback : 224 pages
- ISBN-10 : 1416568123
- ISBN-13 : 978-1416568124
- Item Weight : 10.2 ounces
- Dimensions : 5.5 x 0.6 x 8.44 inches
- Customer Reviews:
About the author

Kevin Wignall is the bestselling author of more than a dozen books for adults and young adults, as well as a number of acclaimed short stories. One of his novels, "The Hunter's Prayer", was turned into a movie starring Sam Worthington and Odeya Rush, and one of his short stories, "Retrospective", was turned into a short film starring Charles Dance. "People Die", "When We Were Lost" and "To Die in Vienna" are all currently in development in Hollywood. He lives most of the time in England, but travels a lot, both to research his stylish international thrillers, and on the lookout for the next big adventure.
Customer reviews
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I have now read four of Wignall's books. One was a little different, a takeoff on I Know What You Did Last Summer, which he acknowledges in the book. That (Among the Dead) was a really good book too, although with a vague ending that left me unsatisfied. But the other three were all part of a formula that he does very well, and which formula it seems he uses in most if not all his other books. And, the Hunters Prayer, was probably the best of them so far for me. It's important to me that I like the protagonist, although I can appreciate a good anti-hero too, as long as not too dark or too edgy. And, although I admire the prowess of those who write about guns or some other technical thing, say, Stephen Hunter, I am often relieved when an author just calls a gun a gun and leaves it at that. Guns don't fascinate me except as a plot device like any other.
And there are some other things I appreciate about Wignall. It is a different hero each time, even if similar. He doesn't really write Reacher books, which is what I call all of those books I read and so often enjoy, where the hero is a virtual superhero, the best shot, the best fighter, and able to seduce beautiful young women within a unrealistically short time, even if they are otherwise virginal. Don't mistake me, Wignall's heroes are very good at their job, or it wouldn't be exciting and do improbable things too, just not to the same level as a Reacher or James Bond (both characters I love). I guess it's just refreshing for characters to have some humility or uncertainty, even if we know where it's heading.
In any event, I suspect I will gobble up every one of his novels rather quickly, as so far he hasn't failed me. Some people apparently give five stars to any book they liked a lot and maybe that's we are supposed to do. I reserve five stars for books like The Lord of the Rings, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, you know, classics, or something really different or outstanding, for the most part (I have violated my own rule at least once), because I feel there should be a distinction between really good and great (Amazon should use a ten star system). So, this could be a five for someone else.
Ella was interesting in the beginning but in the middle of the story her personality did a 180. She became detestable, killing innocent people, Including children.
The only enjoyable character came at the end of the story with the introduction of Dan Borowski.
For me, I wish I hadn't plowed through it. There will never be enough time to read all of the good books we have to choose from.
I thought THE HUNTER’S PRAYER was slightly better than the other four novels. The ending was completely different than I expected. It was so different that I had to re-read the last few pages to make sure that I read what I had read.
THE HUNTER’S PRAYER is a novel that I would consider re-reading again in 10+ years. That to me is a sign that the book is worthy of five stars.
The plot becomes an inverse relationship between the professional killer who seeks redemption and the young girl whose normal life becomes one of obsession for bloody revenge,This is a twisted tale in which a stunning number of people incur violent deaths. Behind and between the killings, a few characters are introduced and developed, but in the end it is a tale of sound and fury signifying little. Its possibly redeeming value is that it is an "entertaining" story for those who like their mysteries bloody
I am sad to say that this book was not worth reading and was a disappointment on all levels.
The story has no provocateur. It has no characters with anything resembling a moral compass worth reading about. It had no mystery and nothing that anyone did not figure out. It had no reason to be.
It contains horrible gratuitous violence and the only victims worth that title are the minor children.
It may be a very long time before I try this author again. If I want this sort of unexplainable depravity, I can watch the evening news.
But it isn't all his fault. He has agents, editors, pre-readers, publishers and maybe more people involved in assisting him make a book that fits the marketing parameters. It must be that none of them had the courage or the talent to see he was creating the example of 'how not to' write a mystery/action/thriller
Top reviews from other countries
"Unbelievable" is another accusation. The story is, in summary about a young woman whose family is killed and her resolve to find the killers and extract revenge in type. She changes from the usual young college student with a boyfriend, over the course of the book into, for want of a better simile a revenging angel. Juxtaposed against that is a man, initially employed to "mind" her, who is a hit man, who is making the exact opposite journey, from being a professional killer to family man. I suppose you could make an argument for the unbelievable claim. But what the story is, is fascinating. You don't really know where it's going and you are consequently compelled to read on.
I obviously don't want to expand further on the plot, but, comparing it with Mr Wignall's other book above, I can say that I found it strangely not as satisfying. I can't actually put my finger on why, but again, I think that this feeling is exactly what Mr Wignall wants us to feel at the end of this story. The main character, right at the end of the book seems to have passed on the baton elsewhere and perhaps that's why I felt as I did.
What this book is, though, is fascinating and compelling. So ignore the naysayers and read it. Not perhaps a classic, but eminently readable. Certainly enough for me to seek another of Kevin Wignall's works to read.
A poacher turned gamekeeper, as a hitman turns protector before agreeing to assist in Ella's quest for vengeance after her family is assassinated. Lucas reluctantly gets back into the life he turned his back on for Ella.
Short at a tad over 200 pages long. Fast-paced, economical prose, a story that grips and an intriguing character study as two individuals undergo an almost 180 degree volte face personality change. Well one definitely, the other was already in the process of metamorphosis before a return to old ways, before a flip-flop back again.
Locations - Tuscany, Switzerland, London, Budapest, Paris, the Caribbean and Australia. And probably a few other as well.
Action, violence, cold-blooded murder, bereavement, bewilderment, books, business, secrets, police, protection, flight, investigation, planning, revenge, lost family x 2, retirement, teenage love, re-connection, a final settlement.
A violent book - yes in places, but never gratuitous, more matter-of-fact with several scenes laced with humour and some tenderness.
Totally believable? Maybe not, but never less than fascinating.
Loved it - almost tempted to pick it up and start reading it again as soon as I had finished.
5 from 5
I have a few books from Kevin Wignall on the pile, most of them bought back in 2008 when I became aware of his work. A bit of a shame this one sat on the TBR pile for 10 years!
Looking forward to Among the Dead, Who is Conrad Hirst? and People Die at some point in the future.
Read in September, 2018
Published - 2004
Page count - 228
Source - purchased copy
Format - hardback
* subsequently re-published as The Hunter's Prayer
I hope his next novel has more plot and more rounded characters.







