More Lawrence Block: John Keller series: * Hit Parade * Hit and Run Bernie Rhodenbarr series: * The Burglar in the Rye Evan Tanner series: * Tanner's Twelve Swingers * The Scoreless Thai * Tanner's Tiger * Tanner's Virgin * Me Tanner, You Jane * Tanner On Ice

J.P. Keller stared at the television screen, stared at the picture of himself, big as life, on CNN. The sound was on, and somebody was saying something, but he couldn’t take it in; it was all he could do to look at his own unfortunate face and the caption under it.

“The Face of a Killer,” it said.

It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out that Keller has been set up. In a Des Moines, Iowa motel room, waiting day by day for the go-ahead on a contract killing (a job that was to have been Keller’s last before taking an early and well-deserved retirement) it now becomes obvious that he was lured here for a completely different reason. He was to be the fall guy, the patsy, for a well planned political assassination. And, now that his face has been broadcast all across the nation, where can he hide?

Keller drives to the airport and swaps the license plates of his rental car for those on an identical vehicle that he finds in the long term parking lot. Hopefully, it will be days before the substitution is detected. Then he hits the road for New York, although he is unsure what he expects to find there. His apartment will undoubtedly be under police surveillance, and Dot, his best friend and business go-between has, according to news reports, been murdered in her White Plains home.

Thus begins an odyssey that will take Keller all across the Midwest, mostly by various back roads, and eventually land him in New Orleans.

Hit and Run is yet another hit for Lawrence Block, one in a long and impressive string of hits. The action is fast and furious, the prose is crisp and colorful, and Block’s wry sense of humor serves as a magnet to draw the reader in. The characters, as always, are fun, funny and lovable. In fact, the great allure of Block’s writing lies in his ability to make the reader identify with a character who should be, in any sane world, completely repugnant to us. J.P. Keller is a murderer, a hit man for hire, who over the years has coldly dispatched dozens of people against whom he held no personal grudge. They were simply a job to be done. Yet somehow, through the magic of Block’s writing, we the readers find ourselves sympathizing, even empathizing with this man. We identify with Keller, and we root for him to find a way out of his predicament. When Keller guns down an elderly gas station owner who is about to blow his cover, we are convinced that the killing is justified.

And this has consistently been one of Lawrence Block’s great talents. In the Bernie Rhodenbarr series, we found ourselves rooting for another career criminal, a bookseller who happens to also be a part-time burglar. Now in the Keller series, a professional hit man becomes our hero.

Bernie the Burglar and Keller the Killer? Coincidence?

Highly unlikely.

Hit and Run is a great read.