Dark Men

November 15, 2011
Haas (The Silver Bear, 2008, etc.) brings his cold, canny professional hit man back in this cold, canny thriller. The author opens with his lethally efficient Columbus, aka the Silver Bear, secluded in an Italian seaside village, hoping to retire from his lucrative work as a hired killer. Risina, his lover, who knows how to cook as well as kill, has "shown him what life could be without a Glock." Of course, in the thriller genre, a killer's retirement means that another bloody junket awaits. And indeed, on a visit to a nearby city, Columbus confronts a man who had been following him. The man, Smoke, hands Columbus a note: "Bring Columbus home," it demands. "Or you'll get Grant back in a way you won't like." This threat against Grant, the Bear's boss, sends Columbus into a maze of fast kills and treachery. At his side follows Risina, insisting she can learn to kill as ruthlessly and remorselessly as Columbus. Her subsequent trial by blood and terror largely defines her, an aspect some readers will find thin, if not objectionable, characterization. Following a trail that leads to Chicago, Kansas City and Connecticut--and to a man who uses skulls as bargaining chips--Columbus demonstrates his deadly touch, his asides to Risina and to himself constituting a primer on how to excel at the fast kill. He's particularly masterful at ferreting out wedges that get people to worm on their associates. In one of the book's more affecting passages, he strong-arms a woman to recall her life with a man she never suspected was a pro killer. When a falling scaffolding takes Smoke's life, Columbus knows the collapse was not an accident. Connecting clues from the accident and from the woman's narrative, he realizes he faces "dark men," a particular kind of foe he's not used to fighting. Intricate and fascinating. Heartless Columbus offers cold comfort on dark nights.

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September 12, 2011
At the start of Haas’s solid third Silver Bear thriller (after 2009’s Columbus), the assassin known as Columbus, who spent his youth “incarcerated in a juvenile detention center” outside Boston, has retired to a seaside Italian village with his rare-book dealer lover, Risina Lorenzana. Then Columbus learns that his former fence, Archibald Grant, has been kidnapped, and that a ransom note demands Columbus’s return to the U.S. as part of the deal. Back in the U.S., Columbus encounters a collector of skulls who is somehow connected to the abduction; kills a man who’s contracted to eliminate the skull collector; watches as an associate of Grant is murdered by a falling scaffold; and becomes involved with a hit man named Spilatro, whose specialty is concocting “death by accident”—and who warns him that “dark men,” CIA operatives, are behind all the mayhem. Poetic prose helps propel a plot that loses some steam toward the end, but Haas keeps readers guessing throughout.