Publication details:
Published by Hodder & Stoughton (Flame)
Trade paperback: January 2000
Mass-market paperback: July 2000
E-book: July 2013
Back cover copy:
A paranoid, reclusive old woman offers you a hundred grand to kill someone. Trouble is, you’re no silent assassin and your target is a man endowed with enormous psychic powers. And yes… he quite clearly knows what you’re up to.
You have two options:
1. Decline the offer.
2. Get a gun, get smashed out of your brain on every drug you can lay your hands on and hit the streets in your souped-up Beamer whilst your ‘hit’ draws you deeper and deeper into his bizarre hallucinatory world.
The choice is yours.
Taking in all the sights and sounds of modern London as seen through the bleary eyes of our (tragi-)comic (anti-)hero, Hitman is inhabited by a cast of grotesque movers and shakers, casualties and misfits, all of them scattered from the corrosive underbelly of the showbiz dream.
Press quotes:
‘Funny, violent and surreal… Hitman will blow you away’ Howard Marks
‘A sure-fire hit’ London Evening Standard
‘The first person perspective is turned upside down, creating a hypnotic world of adrenaline and paranoia, where nothing is certain. A non-stop sprint to the end… A highly accomplished, confident first novel’ The Times
‘Fast-paced and decidedly over-the-limit’ Mirror
‘A comic crawl through a spliffed-out London clubland… The entertainment factor is high in this piece of pure pulp fiction’ Guardian
‘A black comic homage to William S Burroughs’ Daily Telegraph
‘A meeting of minds between Elmore Leonard and Timothy Leary… Bonkers as you like and more fun than chasing the dragon with the Happy Mondays’ The List
‘It’s a high-speed, surreal… trip’ The Face
‘Imagine Carl Hiaasen meets Hunter S Thompson – but funnier and with more drugs. Superb.’ Front Magazine.
To read the opening to Hitman and buy on-line at Amazon.co.uk, please click on the book cover image above.
Read the blog post written to mark the 2013 e-book publication of Hitman.
Max Kinnings 