The Second Life of Nick Mason

Starred review from February 29, 2016
Nick Mason, the hero of this high-octane series launch from Edgar-winner Hamilton (Let It Burn), makes a pact with fellow inmate Darius Cole, a Chicago crime boss, that springs him from prison, where he was doing 25 to life, headlong into a new incarnation as Cole’s no. 1 gun. But deals with the devil don’t usually play out well, as Nick soon learns. The luxurious Lincoln Park West mansion in which Cole sets him up in Chicago, with a mysterious female housemate already in residence, amounts to little more than a gilded cage, until Nick gets the next in a deadly string of assignments—which increasingly threaten the few people he cares about, including his nine-year-old daughter. Readers may not totally buy such plot-greasing elements as the stoic Nick’s quick transformation from midlevel crook to crack assassin, or his tentative romance with pet shop owner Lauren, but for the most part Hamilton guns it like Nick’s 1968 Mustang for a fast and furious ride. A movie adaptation is already in the works from Lionsgate with Nina Jacobson and Shane Salerno producing. Author tour. Agent: Shane Salerno, The Story Factor.

March 15, 2016
When hard-nosed Chicagoan Nick Mason is sprung from an Indiana prison after serving only five years of a 25-year-to-life sentence, he's hardly done paying for a killing he did not commit. When he gets out, Mason must do the bidding of Darius Cole, the feared inmate who used cartel-like connections to get his conviction reversed. A stoic along the lines of Lee Child's Jack Reacher, Mason agrees to the deal out of a fervent desire to see his ex-wife and young daughter before the girl is too old to remember him. A seasoned criminal before he was out of his teens, he had gone straight to raise his family only to be talked into taking part in one last heist. One dead Drug Enforcement Administration agent and one dead friend later, he was in a maximum security unit, refusing to name the fed's real killer. Now, set up by Cole in a swanky, fully stocked pad in Lincoln Park--a far cry from the Irish South Side neighborhood in which he grew up--Mason has barely settled in when he's directed to shoot a man in a motel room. That assignment goes better than a surprise visit to his family in the leafy suburbs, where his remarried wife won't let him see their daughter. Meanwhile, Mason is obsessively tailed by Sandoval, a cop with a checkered history of his own. Chicago has rarely served as a better backdrop for a crime novel, both with its diverse qualities and pervasive corruption. A consummate pro known for his Alex McKnight series (Let it Burn, 2013, etc.), Hamilton surpasses himself with Mason, who inspires storytelling of the leanest, most gripping sort. With a terrific new hero built for the long run, Hamilton stands to gain new followers--especially if Hollywood's plans to adapt the book come to fruition.

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Starred review from March 15, 2016
Hamilton has crafted a tense, coiled thriller with creepy echoes of the Faust legend. Faust doesn't get the world, remember, but the devil does get his soul. Nick Mason is a product of a rough Chicago neighborhood, the kind where the kids turn to crime because they feel it's the only edge they have. He was on the fringes of a heist that went wrong25 years wrong, in a maximum security prison. Five years into it he's singled out by lifer Darius Cole, the Satanic spider who still controls an international web of crime. Cole can purchase Nick's freedom, but Nick must agree to obey whatever instructions Cole transmits by special cell phone. And those instructions become increasingly vicious. Nick balks, and his attempts at redemption force him to confront an evil perhaps greater than Cole. It's the writing and pacing that make this archetypal story work. It moves like a bullet train, told in a deceptively simple, gin-clear prose that all but sucker punches the reader. And just wait until you learn what that greater evil is. Hamilton has been turning out fine thrillers for years, and this onethe first in a projected series, and the book that launched a publishing scandal when the author took it back from its original publisher, charging lack of supportis one of his best. Industry squabbles aside, the novel is too good not to find an audience.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2016, American Library Association.)

December 1, 2015

The two-time Edgar Award winner kicks off a new series starring Nick Mason, out of prison after only five years of a 25-to-life term but beholden to a big-time criminal still behind bars. Originally scheduled for September 2015 with Minotaur and now, after Hamilton's headlines-worthy departure, being released by Putnam.

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