The Ethical Hitman is Out!

So, finally, The Ethical Hitman is out there. Conceived third, written second, and fourth in the original series (but now fifth, or perhaps, mysteriously, sixth), it has taken ten years and fourteen drafts. Okay, a good few of those years were taken up with writing other books and trying to find an agent/publisher, so it’s perhaps not so surprising that it has taken so long.

The germ for this one was the hitman, who I’d included in a previous unfinished novel as one of the kind of unlikely people you sometimes meet hitch-hiking. After the first draft, the hitman evolved into somebody readers of previous books might think they know. I ended up writing the third or fourth draft of this novel at the same time as co-writing the first draft of a previous book in the series (Crossing the Line), and once I saw that my co-author had introduced a killer, it was obvious — to me at least –that the killer would become a hitman, and that hitman would become the hitman in this novel. Everything connects, particularly through the imaginary town of Dereham.

Also slowing down production were my own insecurities. Friends who read early draft mentioned various things, which caused me to rewrite those various things, or restructure other various things. Ultimately, and perhaps unsurprisingly, only one thing ever carried over from my friends’ comments — we get to know Molly better. The rest of the novel, despite my best efforts, remained as it was. Sections I’d taken out would wriggle their way back in, the structure would change, and then change back, characters would grow, and then diminish. In the end, at about draft ten, I looked at it all — the latest draft and the previous draft, and thought:  this is the story it is, and it can only ultimately please me. Although I do hope somebody else enjoys it too.

Set in the autumn of 1976, after the action in Raven of Dispersion, it chronicles the interactions of a hitman, a group of young friends, and Molly — who is possibly a spy, or as deluded as the hitman.  When Nick, hitching home one day, meets a hitman, he doesn’t know what to think. Should he laugh, or be scared? The hitman has ethics, of course — no women, no children. When Nick tells his friends what has happened, they laugh. Of course, it’s mad. The hitman is probably a lonely nutter, the type you sometimes meet out on the road, the type who tells tall tales. So they all forget about the hitman. Instead they worry about themselves. Nick wonders when he can get out of town, Mark obsesses about Chrissie, and Simon missing Anna, finds Jill. Gaz continues stealing things. When Molly breezes into town, and says she’s a spy, the friends are inclined to think her as mad as the hitman. She’s looking for her sister, she says, and for a man she always calls Archie even though she hates him. And then Nick see the car that had picked him up. The nutter’s car, the hitman’s car. Intrigued, he and Mark follow it. They are blithely riding into dangers they cannot understand. Because, after all, the hitman’s ethics don’t cover Nick.

It is then, a tale of love and death. But who loves, and who dies?

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Ethical-Hitman-Dereham-Connections-Node/dp/0993222242