A Pleasure and a Calling

Starred review from September 29, 2014
British writer Hogan’s fourth novel (after All This Will Be Yours) is a gripping psychological thriller that pegs out the creep-o-meter with its chilling, original plot. Mr. Heming is a real estate agent in an English village, very successful, very curious, and very dangerous. He has sold hundreds of houses in 17 years and has kept the keys to all of them. He uses the keys to enter homes and spy, obsessively and surreptitiously interjecting himself into the homeowners’ lives, occasionally altering things for his own amusement, learning everything about each family: “I squeezed the juice out of them, though they didn’t know it.” Mr. Heming doesn’t think of himself as a stalker or voyeur, and he doesn’t consider himself a thief. He is, however, a man who will act decisively if threatened or even merely annoyed. His orderly life is suddenly complicated when he becomes smitten with Abigail Rice, a young woman to whom he sold a house. Abigail is involved with a philandering predator—a married man named Douglas Sharp, another one of Mr. Heming’s clients. Mr. Heming decides that Sharp must be removed, and, with his customary thoroughness, the realtor decides to discredit Sharp, but his complex plan takes a deadly turn. Hogan’s Mr. Heming is a monumentally diabolical character—the fact that he narrates the story further ups both the stakes and the tension. Readers won’t soon forget this first-rate, white-knuckle suspense novel.

November 15, 2014
William Heming sells real estate, but that's not his only pursuit in this dark first-person tale by English journalist Hogan.To say that Heming's past was difficult is an understatement: His mother died in childbirth, his baby brother "disappeared," and his cousin, Isobel, despises him, leaving Heming to be cared for by his aunt Lillian, who finds the young man repulsive. After one incident too many, he's shipped off to boarding school, where his strangeness gets him into all sorts of trouble. Heming loves to steal keys and let himself into other people's homes, including the rooms occupied by fellow students and teachers. But he's not simply looking around; he likes to handle other people's belongings, steal them and sometimes make himself at home. Eventually, he's tossed from school and finds a job as an estate agent. When he encounters a rude dog walker one day, he decides to exact revenge. Since he keeps the keys to all the houses he's ever sold, he still has the one that opens the man's door, so he sneaks inside and leaves a "gift" that sets off a dramatic and deadly chain of events. In Heming's character, Hogan has created a memorably creepy sociopath whose eloquent defense of behavior that most civilized people would find repellant only serves to illustrate the extent of his breaks with reality and, along with it, conventional behavior. Heming also hints at terrible past crimes, generously leaving the reader to fill in the blanks when it comes to both the mechanics and exact outcomes. Hogan skillfully builds a character that combines Mr. Goodbar, Hannibal Lector and Moriarty, but in doing so, he offers the reader little in the way of resolution. Deft characterization, but reading about someone this relentlessly unconscionable will make most readers lunge for the shower as soon as they've reached the final page.

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Starred review from November 15, 2014
The premise is innocuous enough; William Heming is a real-estate agent who helps people buy and sell their homes in a small English town. But Heming keeps the keys to every property he has ever listed and snoops on all the occupants, and he is no ordinary Peeping Tom; he lies in wait for the residence to be unoccupied, and then moves in, however briefly, to enjoy the private space and smells, perusing mail, computers, refrigerators, and more. As he puts it, Among strangers' belongings is where I am most at home. In Hogan's hands, even that is acceptable. Slowly Heming's life unfurls in flashbacks, from early nightmarish childhood through sinister adulthood, and Hogan ups the creepiness a notch with each passing page in this totally engrossing story. When Heming takes it upon himself to serve justice, to right what he perceives as wrongs, we can't help but root for our hero until we discover he may be taking justice a bit too far, which really ratchets up the suspense. Yet somehow we keep hoping he will make his escape, while also hoping he will get caught, and that dichotomy proves simply delicious and addicting. William Heming joins the ranks of unforgettable, unreliable narrators in this gloriously creepy novel of psychological suspense.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2014, American Library Association.)