Eddie's Boy by Thomas Perry

 

(hb; 2020: fourth book in the Butcher’s Boy series)

From the inside flap

“Michael Schaeffer is a retired American businessman, living peacefully in England with his aristocratic wife. But her annual summer party brings strangers to their house, and with them, an attempt on Michael’s life. He is immediately thrust into action, luring his lethal pursuers to Australia before venturing into the lion’s den─the States─to figure out why the mafia is after him─again─and how to stop them. . .”

 

Review 

The fourth Butcher’s Boy novel maintains the engaging, action-punctuated, and tautly written immediacy that make up the story DNA of Perry’s earlier Butcher’s books. This time Michael Schaeffer’s looks back at his childhood with butcher/hitman Eddie Mastrewski as his strict-but-kind father figure run longer and make up a much bigger part of Eddie’s.

When, a decade after the events of The Informant, another hit squad tries to take him out in his England estate (and he, with imaginative and slick efficiency, dispatches them), he is forced to return to stateside to deal with the last of the mobsters who likely ordered his murder. Elizabeth Waring, the FBI agent who’d previously hunted three times is now a high-ranking government employee and thrown into the hunt for Schaeffer (whose real name she still doesn’t know), though this time─as with the two previous books─she's friendlier with him.

Eddie’s is another great entry in the Butcher’s series, with all the elements that initial books in the (thus far) quadrilogy make them standout reads in the action/thriller genre.