Billy Summers

Stephen King really, really wants you to like Billy Summers. He's a highly skilled hitman but he only shoots “bad guys.” He has a tragic backstory. He's a lot smarter than he appears to other people and has secret literary aspirations. He saves damsels in distress.

This desperation for us to love this character adds up to a story that instead of being intense is rather bland and mild. It's not boring; I was certainly compelled enough to at least find out what the setup was. It just doesn't stand out much from any crime thriller, other than the fact that King wrote it. All of the time spent on the set up of Billy's job, plus establishing him as someone with a very different nature than his demeanor, didn't pay off in an interesting way.

The emotional center of the book is on his bond with Alice, which if the reader can buy into this, would make the story more meaningful. I was never convinced they would have any reason to trust each other and there wasn't any tension between them.

It's a readable book, just not one that's going to be memorable. All the political references are going to make it rather dated anyway, should anyone still care to read this in forty years or so. It's not going to be like The Dead Zone, which I would still read right now.