Calling Mr. King

May 2, 2011
An assassin buckling under the demands of his profession develops an appreciation for art in De Feo's dark debut. The assassin, a crack shot known by the alias Peter Chilton, has grown weary of trailing targets through a blur of cosmopolitan cities and finely appointed country estates. It is not the moral burden of his accumulated crimes that tires him but the vapidity of the endless hunt. Yearning for an education, Peter begins to cultivate a taste for architecture and painting, interests that distract him from his work, and after he screws up a job, Peter is sent to New York City to rest, allowing him to further indulge his emerging cultural appetite and a growing resentment of his working-class roots. But his vacation is brought to an abrupt end when he is dispatched on a critical assignment that will change his life. It's an engrossing story, persuasively depicting an angry, obsessive man as he comes to a greater awareness of the world around him. And though Peter's pursuitsâof art, enlightenment, his targetsâbegin to feel monotonous in their relentlessness, De Feo's master strokes are in creating a remorseless psychopath you'd enjoy spending time with, and in resisting the easy temptation to bring Peter to a moment of emotional deliverance.

May 15, 2011

A hit man discovers his inner aesthete. Uh-oh. 

From childhood on, John Cole hated his old man with a passion. The permanently angry blue-collar worker would go into the woods outside their Hudson River town and shoot everything in sight. Cole inherited his father's expert marksmanship; he left home before they shot each other. Unemployed, he was hired to put his skill to good use...on a human target. He had found his profession. Word of his expertise spread. He moved to London to work for a world-wide conglomerate known as the Firm; he never missed his targets. But when we first meet the 33-year-old Cole, he has the nagging feeling that he's off his game. A quick job in Paris has taken a whole week, and he almost botches his next job, outside a Georgian house in the English countryside. He gets his man but is forced to shoot a bystander as well, breaking a cardinal rule. This is a terrific start. First-time novelist De Feo hooks us as he describes Cole tracking his quarry. These are clean kills; there is no splatter. The author also has a great premise: that a hired gun's need for a career change might take him in a wholly unexpected direction. That beautiful Georgian house has sparked Cole's imagination. Why couldn't he be the owner? He buys books on Georgian architecture. An escapist fantasy becomes a scholarly pursuit. The Firm sends him to New York to lie low after that countryside mess. Here the novel stalls; De Feo doesn't know what to do with Cole except have him buy more books and visit museums. He becomes a bore, moaning about his miserable childhood on a pointless visit to his hometown. By the final segment in Barcelona, Spain, scene of Cole's new assignment, his transformation is complete. The hit man, in denial, has become a student of Spanish architecture.

Though character development is a real problem, De Feo is definitely a newcomer to watch.

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