Slaughter Music

Tim Hawk is young, virginal – and a hit-man. He plans his assassinations well, rehearsing them with cool detachment, and his professionalism makes him a rising star in Kazan’s gang. Hawk’s only other interest, an unexpected love for baroque opera – Handel, Telemann and Purcell – is kept concealed. When Kazan returns from the Ukraine with his beautiful young bride-to-be, the naive and vulnerable Irena, Hawk presents the pair with a macabre wedding present. Other guests are shocked, but Kazan and Irena are intrigued. Then Kazan, fatefully, charges Hawk with protecting his prized young bride – half Kazan’s age, much the same age as Tim Hawk. “When beauty’s the prize What mortal fears dying?”It isn’t only Kazan’s marriage that is vulnerable. His empire is under siege. As threats and danger mount, Kazan’s marriage and criminal empire are undermined and he finds himself betrayed and let down on all sides. The only people he can rely on, it seems, are his wife and the trusted Hawk. On Guy Fawkes night, as a full-scale gang war breaks out, the doomed trio rush to a violent and operatic climax.REVIEWS:"The best since his extraordinary debut, Underground...Few contemporary writers have so powerfully evoked the sheer bloody menace of our capital city."- GQ magazine, June '95 "A narrative rich enough to qualify as good literature of any ilk."- A Shot In The dark, Sept '94"Quirky enough to make you sit up and take notice."- Literary Review, October '94 "One of fiction's most rococco tough guys."- Guardian, October '94 "Who says Brits can't write true hardboiled? This guy is good!James makes it all come starkly alive, dangerous and fascinating...Someone to watch."- Gary Lovis, Editor, Hardboiled magazine, March '95 "If you savor the hard-boiled crime novel the way a wine connoisseur lingers over the aroma and first sip of a deliciously rare vintage, it would be a pity to bypass Slaughter Music. Russell James, an Englishman, first enticed US readers with the tough realism of Payback (1993), and now delivers a worthy successor steeped in bloody violence, Machiavellian intrigue and intricate psychological suspense."- Michael Davis in Mostly Murder, June '95 "Not until Slaughter Music did I come in contact with British prose of the definitely hard-boiled, sharp-edged style... It was worth the wait."- Tom Piccirilli in Mystery News"Pulp fiction at its classiest, without a shred of redemption or lame sentimentality."- Peter Handel in the San Francisco Chronicle