Shovel Ready by Adam Sternbergh
Shovel Ready by Adam Sternbergh
I was in the mood for a bit of dark hitman action when I stumbled upon a review of this book and when I saw it on Blogging for Books I snapped it up.
The story is set in a post dirty bomb New York City where the rich have retreated into their homes and locked themselves off from the rest of the world, existing only in a hyper real version of todays internet where they can live out their darkest fantasies. The streets at night are empty, except for food delivery boys, doorman guarding bulletproof glass building facades and the occasional hitman.
Our protagonist, Spademan, is an ex garbage man who has turned himself into a bullet that kills without remorse; his theory being that the killing is not hard it’s the living with the killing and as he does not initiate the killing it is not his to justify. Within the first page I had given him the voice of Marv played by Mickey Rourke from Sin City, just gravelly, considered and worn.
“I kill men. I kill women because I don’t discriminate. I don’t kill children because that’s a different kind of psycho”.
It’s a familiar set up with the age old ‘hitman with code is forced to live up to code when some cock tries to make him break it’ thing going on. Think every Transporter movie. There is a real darkness and atmosphere that is palpable to the writing though and it is a really great story. Spademan has a distinct voice in the way he speaks and thinks, which by the way is often blurred due to the complete lack of quotation marks. It’s an interesting choice and sometimes works well and means you have an unending stream of consciousness, it is particularly effective during Spademan’s musings however as the book builds into its frenetic conclusion it makes following the actions quite hard. When you have 6 different characters and roughly two to three locations, some of which exist in the real world, some in the imagined, it can all get a bit confusing and at points I just wanted to know exactly who was where, at what time and doing what.
“Everyone who was left died in the second explosion. I hope she died in the first one. The diversion. That’s what passes for hope these days”.
It’s a bleak outlook on future life but a plausible one. I’ll keep an eye out for the next one as this was quite short and an easy read and something different from what I’ve been reading recently. I encourage you to step out of your comfort zone and give this a go if it is not normally something you pick up.
3.5 stars
