Sniper’s one last job

Billy Summers  is a sniper who can take deadly headshot at 1, 200  yards.

Billy Summers is among the best snipers in the world, a decorated Iraq war vet, a Houdini when it comes to vanishing after the job is done.

Billy  Summers learned his craft as a US Marine and honed it in the streets of Falluja during the Iraq war. His first kill was in his trailer where he grew up.

Now a gun for hire only to kill bad guys and has a plan for luxurious retirement.

Stephen King is in his elements is engaged in multi-layered tale  is a mix of crime novel, war memoir and touching love story, with his command of the arena  where it unfolds  small-town America.

In his memoir King recollects going to school in Durham. Maine a place where “life wore little or make up”.

Summers is posing as a writer while he waits to carry out the hit, and in an engaging twist, starts to write his memoir, looping back to his childhood and the time in the Marines.  But as he waits for the call to come, for his last hit, he cannot remain aloof from his neighbours. Scattering around the main storyline are nuggets about both the craft of writing.

 

Summers feels like a man emerging from a vivid dream. In Billy Summers the art of creating fiction is portrayed an empowering force.

Billy Summers by Stephen King, Hodder & Stoughton, £20, 448 pages, scriber $30, 528 pages.