Eddie's Boy

September 15, 2020
Nine years after his comeback appearance in The Informant (2011), the Butcher's Boy returns yet again, and for the usual reason: Because somebody's trying to kill him. Michael Schaeffer, as he's been calling himself now for many years, hardly breaks a sweat dispatching the four hit men who break into his aristocratic wife's Yorkshire home. But an old pro like him realizes they're only the tip of an iceberg, and when his flight to Australia merely makes him the target of a completely new crew of assassins, he realizes that the only way to end such a serpentine plot is to cut off its head. Breaking cover to drop in uninvited on Elizabeth Waring, the Justice Department Organized Crime official who still dreams of turning him into an informant, he learns one fact that could explain why he's suddenly become a person of interest to both feds and organized crime once more: the impending parole hearing of Carlo Balacontano, a career criminal convicted in 1982 of the rare murder he didn't commit. The Butcher Boy, hired by Bala for a routine hit and then placed in the crosshairs by his client because Bala didn't care to pay him, killed Bala's frontman, Arthur Fieldston, and then took exceptional pains to frame Bala for the crime. Has his former client been waiting all these years for revenge? Or are the folks at Justice taking advantage of his possible parole to turn up the heat on Michael Schaeffer? Either way, many more brutally efficient executions are guaranteed. The biggest surprise here is the number of extended flashbacks to the Butcher Boy's apprenticeship to (who else?) the Butcher. Despite the valedictory elements, Perry makes the distant past as vivid and immediate as the relentlessly paced present.

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Starred review from October 5, 2020
Edgar-winner Perry’s superbly crafted fourth Butcher’s Boy novel (after 2011’s The Informant) opens with retired hit man Michael Schaeffer driving a car with the bodies of three inept assassins he killed earlier that night as they were breaking into the Yorkshire manor house he shares with his wife, Meg. Michael intends to find out who ordered the hit on him, and after saying goodbye to Meg, who’s fully aware of his former profession, he travels to Australia for safety. But when gunmen ambush him there as well, Michael realizes, after eliminating them with ruthless efficiency, that a trip to the States will be necessary to pinpoint the origin of the attacks. In the U.S., he seeks out Justice Department bigwig Elizabeth Waring, who once used him as an informant, and suggests a trade for info about his hunters. It soon becomes clear that the likely instigator is a Mafia don Michael helped send to prison years earlier by framing him for a murder. An immensely clever cat and mouse game he engineers involving Waring and various mob factions ensues. Perry delivers a master class in the art of propulsive tension. Agent: Mel Berger, WME.

Starred review from November 1, 2020
Perry is a master at finding humanity in criminals, especially in his stand-alone thrillers; fortunately, he sometimes brings back these bewitching bad guys, straddling the line between series and stand-alone. Take Michael Shaeffer, hit-man hero of Perry's Edgar-winning debut novel, The Butcher's Boy (1982). This is the third time in 38 years that the spotlight-shunning Shaeffer has emerged from retirement to dispatch another batch of younger hoodlums eager to claim the longstanding price on the Butcher's Boy's head. Shaeffer is enjoying retirement in England with his aristocratic wife when three American mobsters track him down from across the pond. Sure, Shaeffer gets rid of them quickly, but bigger problems lurk: Who's after him and why now, when it appeared that he'd finally dropped off the Mob's radar? To find out, Shaeffer must return to the U.S., where both mobsters and feds await him. In trying to carve a more permanent separate peace, Shaeffer revisits various old haunts, giving Perry the welcome opportunity to reacquaint us with his antihero's surrogate father, Eddie, a loving parent who trained his young charge in killing for hire: ""Those road trips they'd taken to murder someone were what he'd had instead of family vacations."" The irony in that sentence is what makes the Butcher's Boy unlike any other fictional hit man. He's a good son who learned his father's trade and now is trying to unlearn it. Just try not rooting for him.

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