Why You'll Love This
A retired hitman walks into a Justice Department official's home in the middle of the night — and somehow that's the start of the most uneasy alliance in crime fiction.
- Great if you want: morally complex cat-and-mouse between a killer and a fed
- The experience: cool-headed and methodical — tension that builds through precision, not chaos
- The writing: Perry strips away sentiment and lets motive and consequence do the work
- Skip if: you haven't read the earlier books — the dynamic earns its weight
About This Book
Some relationships defy every reasonable boundary—and the one at the heart of The Informant may be the strangest in crime fiction. The Butcher's Boy is a professional killer who has spent years in careful hiding, and Elizabeth Waring is the Justice Department official who has spent those same years certain he exists. When the Mafia sends a hit team after him, he makes a decision that is equal parts ruthless and pragmatic: he walks back into Waring's life. What follows is a tense, unlikely alliance between two people who have every reason to distrust each other and a shared enemy large enough to make distrust a luxury neither can afford.
Thomas Perry writes with a controlled economy that never feels cold—his prose does precisely what it needs to and nothing more, which turns out to be quite a lot. The pleasure of reading him is watching a supremely intelligent author construct a thriller where both sides of a moral equation are rendered with genuine complexity. Waring and the Butcher's Boy are each fully realized, each operating by their own coherent logic, and Perry never lets you forget how precarious that logic becomes when the two collide.
