{"product_id":"the-ethical-assassin-isbn-9780812974546","title":"The Ethical Assassin","description":"Edgar award-winning author of the popular historical novels A Conspiracy of Paper and A Spectacle of Corruption, David Liss showcases his amazing versatility with this brilliant new tale of contemporary suspense: a literary thriller set in Florida, where killing is a matter of conscience.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eNo one is more surprised than Lem Altick when it turns out he’s actually good at peddling encyclopedias door to door. He hates the predatory world of sales, but he needs the money to pay for college. Then things go horribly wrong. In a sweltering trailer in rural Florida, a couple whom Lem has spent hours pitching is shot dead before his eyes, and the unassuming young man is suddenly pulled into the dark world of conspiracy and murder. Not just murder: assassination– or so claims the killer, the mysterious and strangely charismatic Melford Kean, who has struck without remorse and with remarkable good cheer. But the self-styled ethical assassin hadn’t planned on a witness, and so he makes Lem a deal: Stay quiet and there will be no problems. Go to the police and take the fall. \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eBefore Lem can decide, he is drawn against his will into the realm of the assassin, a post-Marxist intellectual with whom he forms an unlikely (and perhaps unwise) friendship. The ethical assassin could be a charming sociopath, eco-activist, or vigilante for social justice. To unravel the mystery and save himself, Lem must descend deep into a bizarre world he never knew existed, where a group of desperate–and genuinely deranged–schemers have hatched a plan that will very likely keep Lem from leaving town alive.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eDavid Liss skillfully interweaves a gallery of eccentric characters with a multilayered plot characterized by its unpredictable twists and turns. The Ethical Assassin is a brilliant, darkly comic novel that will leave readers in suspense until the very last page.Advance praise for\u003ci\u003e \u003c\/i\u003eThe Ethical Assassin\u003cb\u003e\u003ci\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Gripping entertainment from the opening pages–a terrific read with the page-turning energy of a first-rate thriller, but also far more than that. David Liss has written a genre-bender with more than its share of white-knuckle suspense, vivid characters, and surprising humor.”\u003cbr\u003e–Joseph Finder, author of Company Man\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Hilarious, poignant, and laced with paranoia, The Ethical Assassin reads like a Hardy Boys mystery on acid. David Liss pulls out all the stops in this Homeric coming-of-age tale. A vibrant and sweaty page-turner, this book explodes with fresh, memorable characters and a soundtrack I’d like to own.”\u003cbr\u003e–Mark Haskell Smith, author of Moist and Delicious\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Hypnotic and addictive storytelling.”\u003cbr\u003e–Lee Child, author of One Shot\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Imagine David Lynch’s bizarre masterpiece Blue Velvet, scripted by Edna Buchanan and Carl Hiaasen. It’s a blast.”\u003cbr\u003e–Kirkus Reviews (starred review)David Liss is the author of A Spectacle of Corruption, The Coffee Trader, and A Conspiracy of Paper, winner of the 2000 Edgar Award for Best First Novel. He lives in San Antonio with his wife and daughter, and can be reached via his website at www.davidliss.com.Chapter 1\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    It was friday evening, just after seven o’clock, and still bright as   noon. In Florida, August is perpetual, relentless, refusing to unclench   its fist, and despite the looming sunset it was close to a hundred   degrees. The heat settled in my body, dull and enervating, and it   accentuated the smell that hung in the air—a stink both tangible and   elusive, like the skin of grease on a cold bowl of stew. It was more   than a smell, but a thing, heavy enough to weigh like cotton balls   shoved into the back of your throat. A putrid miasma whirled and eddied   through the streets of the trailer park. I don’t mean   hot-garbage-by-the-curb smells—rotting chicken carcasses and old   diapers and potato peelings. No such luck. It smelled like a prison   camp outhouse. Worse.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    I stood there on the spiderwebbed concrete step leading up to the   mobile home, propping open the screen door with my shoulder. Sweat   trickled down my side and clung to my overworked undershirt. I’d been   at it since a little after lunch, and I was in a haze now, an automaton   lost in the blankness of ringing doorbells, delivering my pitch,   lurching forward again. I glanced left and right at the faded white   mobile homes and thought it both amusing and profoundly sad that I   couldn’t remember coming down this street.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    I wanted nothing more than to make it inside someone’s home, to get out   of the heat. The trailer’s window-unit air conditioner hummed and   rattled and almost bucked, trickling condensation into an eroded gully   of white sand. I was overdressed for the heat, and every few hours I   needed a blast of AC, like an antidote, in order to keep up the fight.   I’d chosen my attire not for comfort but to look smart and to do   business: tan chinos, wrinkles smoothed out by the humidity, a thickly   striped blue-and-white shirt, and a square-cut, knit turquoise tie,   maybe three inches wide. It was 1985, and I thought the tie looked   pretty cool.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    I knocked again and then jammed my thumb into the glowing peach navel   of the doorbell. No answer. The muted hum of a television or maybe a   stereo barely pierced the door, and I saw a slight rustle of the   slatted blinds, but still no answer. Not that I blamed them, whoever   they were, squatting behind their sofa, pantomiming Shhhh with fingers   pressed to lips. I was on their stoop, a teenager in a tie, trying to   sell them something, they would think—rightly so—and who needed that?   Then again, who needed them? It was a self-selecting system. I’d been   doing this for only three months, but I knew that much already. The   ones who came to the door were the ones you wanted to come to the door.   The ones who let you in were the ones you wanted to let you in.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    The heavy brown leather bag, which my stepfather had given me reluctant   permission to borrow from its mildewing box in the garage, dug a trench   into my shoulder. Touching the thing always made me feel dirty, and it   smelled like split-pea soup. He hadn’t used the bag in years, but my   stepfather had still thought it important to act put-upon before he   reluctantly agreed to let me clean out the mouse droppings and polish   it with leather restorer.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    I adjusted the strap to lessen the pain and plodded down the steps and   along the old walkway that bisected the lawn—really just an ocean of   sand peppered with a few islands of crabgrass. At the street I looked   in both directions, unsure which way to go, which way I’d come from,   but down to my left I saw a flyer flapping lazily against the corner   mailbox, affixed with a long swath of dull silver duct tape. The   missing cat flyer. I’d seen—what?—two or three of those that day? Maybe   twice as many missing dog flyers. Not all the same dog or cat, either,   and I was sure I’d passed by this one already. It had a photocopied   picture of a white or tan tabby with dark splotches across its face,   its mouth open, tongue barely visible. Anyone seeing a plump kitty   named Francine should call the number below.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    I headed away from the flyer. I was sticking to the same side of the   street, passing a vacant lot to get to the next trailer. My legs,   defying the demand for pep from my brain, moved slowly, shuffling   almost. I looked again at my watch, which hadn’t much budged since just   before I rang the bell. At least four hours to go, and I needed to   rest. I needed to be able to sit still for a while, but that wasn’t   really it. What I needed was relief from thinking about the job, even a   good night’s sleep, as if such a thing were possible, but I could give   up all hope of sleep. It wouldn’t happen on the road, when I worked all   day and half the night. Not at home, on my one day off, when there were   errands to run and friends and family to see before the cycle began   again. I’d been operating on less than four hours a night for three   months now. How long could I do it? Bobby, my crew boss, said he’d been   doing it for years, and he seemed okay.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    I had no plans of doing it for years. Just one year, that was all, and   that was plenty. I was pretty good at the job—more than pretty good—and   I made money, but there I was, seventeen years old, and I could feel   myself aging, feel soreness accumulating in my joints, feel a   beleaguered rounding in my shoulders. My eyes didn’t seem to work as   well, my memory had begun to frazzle, my bathroom habits were   irregular. It was the lifestyle. I’d gone to sleep at home, just   outside Ft. Lauderdale, the night before. The alarm had jerked me out   of bed at six so I could get to the local office by eight, where I’d   sat in pep meetings until we all hopped in the car and headed out to   the Jacksonville area, checked into a motel, and got to work. Another   standard weekend gets under way.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Tires rumbled behind me, and I instinctively veered over toward the   empty lot, careful to avoid the nests of fire ants and the prickly   weeds that would find their way to my dark gray gym socks, which only a   seventeen-year-old could convince himself passed for respectable as   long as no one saw the sporty stripes.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Keeping over to the side was the smart thing in places like this.   Locals wouldn’t have to look at me twice to see that I was way out of   my element. They would throw mostly empty beer cans or swerve at me,   half-playful and half-homicidal. They would shout things, and I thought   it a pretty good guess they were withering insults, insults that would   sting like salt in my eyes if I could hear them, but they’d be garbled   against the whoosh of a speeding truck and the crackling speakers   blasting 38 Special. I didn’t know if the other guys had to put up with   the same crap, but I doubted it.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    A dark blue Ford pickup rolled to a stop. It looked freshly washed, and   its paint glistened like a tar pit in the glare of the almost setting   sun. The passenger-side window lurched down, and the driver, a guy in   his thirties with a black T-shirt, learned over toward the window. He   looked handsome in an odd way, like the debonair guy in a cartoon out   to steal the hero’s girl, but like a cartoon character, he was oddly   distorted. He was puffy. Not fat or heavy or anything. Just puffy, like   a corpse beginning decomposition or a man suffering from an allergic   reaction.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    The puffiness was weird, sure, but what I mostly noticed was his hair.   He kept it sheared to almost a military cut, but in the back it came   down in a straight fan to his shoulders. Today they call this style a   mullet. In 1985 I’d never seen a mullet before, had no idea what a   mullet was, what it was called, or why someone might choose to endure   such a thing except for the simple thrifty pleasure that comes from   having two haircuts on one head. All I knew was that it looked   monumentally stupid.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    “Where you going?” the guy asked. His voice buckled under the weight of   his syrupy accent, uniquely Florida. Half pecan pie, half key lime. We   were about thirty miles outside of Jacksonville, and heavy accents were   par for the course.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    I’d lived in Florida since the third grade and had long been afraid of   just about everyone outside a major urban center. In no way did I   consider this cowardice, but common sense. Despite the popular belief   that big cities like Ft. Lauderdale and Jacksonville and Miami were   nothing but suburbs of New York or Boston, they were, in reality, dense   with longtime Florida natives, a vocal minority of whom included   Confederate flag wavers, “Dixie” hummers, and cross burners. These   cities were also full of transplants from all over the country, so   things balanced out reasonably well. Step out to the boonies, and the   flavor became considerably less cosmopolitan.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    I now stood, as far as I was concerned, in the boonies, which meant   that the iridescent kick my jew ass sign on my forehead, visible only   to those who preferred Hank Williams Jr. to Sr., began to throb and   fire off sparks. I conjured a polite smile for the pickup driver, but   the smile turned out badly, crooked and sheepish.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    For an instant, I considered giving the guy my line, about how I was in   the neighborhood to speak with parents about education, but I knew   instantly it was a bad idea. Puffy Guy with his weird hair and his   pampered pickup radiated a low tolerance for bullshit. My crew boss,   Bobby, could probably get away with the pitch. Hell, Bobby would   probably score off the guy, but I was not Bobby. I was good, maybe the   best guy in Bobby’s crew—maybe the best guy Bobby had found in a long   while. But I wasn’t Bobby.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    “I’m selling,” I said with a startling realization, like the flip of a   switch, that I wasn’t merely uneasy, I was afraid. Even in all that   heat, I felt cold, and my muscles had begun to tense. “Door-to-door,” I   added. I took the bag off my shoulder and set it down between my black   dress sneakers.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    The man leaned a little farther toward me and grinned a mouth full of   haphazardly arranged teeth. The two front ones, in particular, were   long like a rabbit’s, but widely spaced and moving in opposite   directions. Their crookedness stood out all the more for their unusual,   even radiant, whiteness. I wished I hadn’t seen them, because now I had   to try not to stare.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    “You got a permit for that?” He yanked at something between his legs   and came up with a nearly full bottle of Yoo-hoo, which he put to his   lips for a good ten seconds. When he set it down again, the bottle was   now more than half-empty. I suppose an optimist would say it was   half-full.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    A permit. I’d never heard of such a thing. Did I need a permit? Bobby   hadn’t said anything about it; he’d merely dropped me off and told me   to hit the trailer park hard. Bobby loved trailer parks.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    I had to stay focused, act confident, presume this guy wouldn’t try   anything too crazy, not in the middle of the street, albeit a   sinisterly deserted street. “My boss told me to sell here,” I said,   looking at the pavement rather than his teeth.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    “I didn’t ask who told you to do nothing,” the guy said, shaking his   head with sadness at the poor state of things. “I asked if you had a   permit.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    I tried to tell myself I shouldn’t be so afraid. Nervous, sure.   Anxious, guarded, alert—you bet. But this was like being ten years old   again, caught in the nasty neighbor’s yard or messing around with your   friend’s father’s power tools. “Do I need one?”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    The guy in the pickup fixed his gaze on me. He curled his upper lip   into a half pucker, half scowl. “Answer the question, boy. You stupid?”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    I shook my head, partly in disbelief and partly in answer to his   question. “I don’t have a permit,” I said. I tried to look away again,   but his eyes were bearing down on me.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Then the redneck burst into a huge, crooked-tooth grin. “Well, it’s a   good thing you don’t need one, then, ain’t it?”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    It took me a minute to understand what had happened, and then I forced   a nervous attempt at an I’m-a-good-sport laugh. “Yeah, I guess it is.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    “You listen up. You best stay out of trouble. You know what happens to   people caught breaking the law round here?”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    “They’re asked to squeal like pigs?” I tried to keep it from coming   out, but despite my fear it slipped through my grasp and got away from   me. It could happen to anyone.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    The redneck’s dark eyes went narrow over his long nose. “You being a   smart-ass?”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    What the hell kind of question was that? Could there be any explanation   for what I’d said other than smart-assedness? I decided not to point   that out.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    When people say that they had the metallic taste of fear in their   mouth, that metal is generally copper. My mouth tasted like copper.   “Just keeping things light,” I managed, along with a forced expression   of calm and affability.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    “What’s a smart-ass like you doing out here, anyhow? Why ain’t you in   your college?”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    “I’m trying to earn money for college,” I told him, hoping my industry   would impress him.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    It didn’t. “Ain’t you something, college boy? Am I going to have to   come out of here and smack you in the pussy?”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    There was, of course, no dignified way to answer that question. Maybe   Bobby would be able to shrug it off, crack some self-effacing joke to   make the guy in the pickup like him. Next thing you know, they’d be   laughing like old friends. Not me. The only thing I could think of was   groveling—or to imagine an alternate universe version of me, the Lem   who would walk over to the open window and pound the guy in the face   until his nose burst and his stupid haircut was matted with blood. The   Lem in this universe didn’t do that sort of thing, but it always seemed   to me that if I could do it once, if I could be the sort of person who   might beat the living shit out of a jerk giving me a hard time, then   that fact would be written on my body, my face, in my walk, and I   wouldn’t be, once again, under the thumb of a bully high on his own   power over me.Edgar Award-winning author of A Conspiracy of Paper [quote]--Baltimore Sun","brand":"Ballantine Books","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":46300272394469,"sku":"NP9780812974546","price":20.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/1842\/7735\/files\/9780812974546.jpg?v=1767739226","url":"https:\/\/k12savings.com\/products\/the-ethical-assassin-isbn-9780812974546","provider":"K12savings","version":"1.0","type":"link"}