King of the Weeds

October 13, 2014
What's billed as the penultimate Mike Hammer novel, a posthumous collaboration between Collins and Spillane (Complex 90), will leave even die-hard fans wondering whether the effort to complete the manuscript was worthwhile. Instead of the gritty violence and razor-sharp prose that made the series and its lead iconic from the outset, this outing offers plot contrivances and sillinessâand whether they originated with Spillane or not is irrelevant. As the book opens in the late 1990s, Mike Hammer, who's in his mid-60s, is shot twice as he goes to his New York City office, but the hit man, conveniently and improbably, takes off before insuring the PI is dead. This is but a prelude to a storyline centering on a treasure trove of $89 billion (yes, billion) that Hammer has squirreled away, the reopening of an old serial killer case, and a string of odd cop deaths. Labored prose (e.g., "the sky did a tympani number and that wet gray blanket over the city finally let go") doesn't help. Agent: Dominick Abel, Dominick Abel Literary Agency.

June 1, 2014
Mysteries abound in the next-to-last Mike Hammer novel, left incomplete when Spillane died in 2006 and finished seamlessly by frequent Spillane collaborator Collins. For starters, who's trying to kill Mike? Does his attempted murder have anything to do with a 40-year-old case in which an incarcerated serial killer is claiming to be innocent? Or has someone else found out about the $89 billionyes, you read that right, $89 billionin Mob money that Mike has stashed away in a sealed-off mountain cave? Set in the late 1990s, the book reads like any of Spillane's vintage Hammer novels, with the customary mixture of violence and witty dialogue. Fans of the long-running series (which began with 1947's I, the Jury) should bump this one to the top of their reading lists.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2014, American Library Association.)