Billy Summers is a man in a room with a gun. He’s a killer for hire and the best in the business. But he'll do the job only if the target is a truly bad guy. And now Billy wants out. But first there is one last hit given to him by mobster Nick Majarian on behalf of wealthy media mogul Roger Klerke: assassinate a fellow hitman named Joel Allen, who is facing a possible death penalty and might reveal incriminating secrets about his previous (and Billy's current) employers in an attempt to lessen his sentence. Billy is among the best snipers in the world, a decorated Iraq war vet, a Houdini when it comes to vanishing after the job is done. So what could possibly go wrong?
How about everything?
This novel provides examples of:
- Agonizing Stomach Wound: This is what ultimately kills Billy, as he's gutshot by the mother of one of the goons he badly injured at Nick's mansion after he kills Klerke. He has Alice buy painkillers from a dealer in a truck stop, but he doesn't survive the journey back to Bucky's place to possibly get off-the-books medical help.
- The Alcoholic: Billy's mom became one following the brutal death of her daughter, hence why Billy was put in a foster home.
- Blackmail: Joel Allen was blackmailing Roger Klerke, hence why Klerke now wants him dead. Ironically, Allen was originally hired by Klerke to kill Klerke's own son, Patrick, who started the blackmail, but after completing the job, Allen used the evidence gathered by Patrick to blackmail Klerke himself.
- Big Bad: Roger Klerke, the media mogul who ordered the hit on Joel Allen to cover up the fact that he assassinated his own son who was going to bring some disturbing truths about him to light.
- Canon Welding:
- With The Shining. The area where the Overlook burned down appears at a few points since Bucky's hideout is on the opposite side of the valley from it. At one point Alice sees the Overlook itself appear for a brief moment. Billy also observes a painting of the Overlook's hedge animals in a lodge that he uses as his writing room while he and Alice are staying with Bucky. Like the hedge animals from The Shining, the animals in the painting appear to move when they're not being observed. Billy turns the painting around to face the wall multiple times, but it always ends up facing back out, and he finally takes it down and throws it into the valley.
- At one point late in the novel, Billy waves to a clown sitting beside a ballerina holding a red balloon in the back of a passing car.
- Corrupt Corporate Executive: Roger Klerke, a wealthy media mogul, who is guilty of abusing various young girls, including one of barely 11, and had his son Patrick killed after the latter blackmailed him with evidence regarding this abuse.
- Dark and Troubled Past: As a child, Billy's younger sister is murdered by his mother's abusive boyfriend and Billy is forced to shoot the boyfriend to protect himself.
- Diabolus ex Machina: After getting revenge on those who double-crossed him, Billy is fatally wounded by the mother of a goon he had previously injured.
- Even Evil Has Standards: Billy is an assassin who will only agree to kill bad people. It's how he's able to sleep at night although he still considers himself to be a bad person at the end of the day.
- Exiled to the Couch: Played with, as it's a self-imposed exile by Billy after Alice moves in with him. After some arguing, she allows him to take the couch while she gets the only bed. However, she insists to swap places the next night, which Billy doesn't object to.
- Eye Scream: Billy overpowers Jack, one of Alice's rapists, by spraying Easy-Off oven cleaner in his eyes.
- The Farmer and the Viper: Following the investigation of the incident where Billy shot his mother's abusive boyfriend after the latter murdered Billy's sister, the officer in charge uses the story of the Frog and the Scorpion to make it clear to Billy's mother how she is also to blame for things escalating this far, because she kept the relationship going despite knowing about her boyfriend's violent nature.
- Free-Range Children: When Billy has just settled in his new house, he meets two of the neighborhood kids, a boy named Danny and a girl named Shanice. During their quick talk, it becomes clear their parents allow them to roam around the neighborhood all on their own, which Billy considers quite unusual for the twenty-first century.
- Hollywood Silencer: Discussed; Billy lampshades how, in a movie, a sniper tasked with an assignment like his would probably use a silencer to hide his position. However, Billy knows that in real life the bullet breaking through the sound barrier would still cause a loud sound that no silencer can prevent, and even if it could, Billy doesn't like using silencers since he wants to keep the tip of his rifle clear of any add-ons that could potentially ruin his shot.
- He Knows Too Much: Once it is clear that he is not getting paid, Billy correctly assumes that Nick will dispose of anyone that could link him to Billy. He is not surprised when soon after, Ken Hoff is found dead in his car in an apparent suicide, and Giorgio Piglielli goes missing (though it's eventually revealed he was not killed, but left the country to go to a health clinic in Brazil).
- Hope Spot: The climax is written in-universe in the format of one of Billy's recollections and ends with him surviving a gunshot. We later discover that it was Alice, not Billy, writing this section and that Billy in fact eventually succumbed to his wounds.
- Karmic Rape: Billy in effect does this to the ring leader of Alice's rapists. With a hand mixer. And he takes a picture of the aftermath to blackmail them with should they call the police on him.
- Love Martyr: Discussed; Billy suspects Alice staying with him is partly due to Stockholm Syndrome on top of him saving her. He asks her if she's familiar with the phenomenon, and when she denies he instructs her to tell the police she was afraid to leave him should he ever get captured.
- Most Writers Are Writers: Billy's cover story while waiting for the assassination to happen is that he's working on a novel. He proceeds to write one for real based on his own personal backstory.
- Never Hurt an Innocent: This is Billy's moral code as an assassin.
- No Celebrities Were Harmed: Roger Klerke — an aging billionaire who owns numerous media companies including a right-wing news channel — seems to be based off Rupert Murdoch, with elements of Harvey Weinstein.
- No-Tell Motel: Billy and Alice, after setting out to get Nick and Roger, mostly stay in non-franchise motels to stay off the grid. Alice even namedrops the trope when telling Bucky about what happened after they killed Roger.
- Obfuscating Stupidity: Billy's public persona when dealing with his handlers is that he's Dumb Muscle who knows how to use a gun but not much else. In reality, he's much smarter than he lets on. Billy refers to this persona as his "Dumb Self". Among the techniques he uses to keep up the masquerade are reading Archie Comics in public. People who see him drop in and out of the persona are very taken aback.
- Offing the Offspring: Billy's target, Joel Allen, was originally hired by Roger Klerke to kill Klerke's own son, Patrick, who was blackmailing his father due to being denied inheriting his father's company.
- One Last Job: Billy agrees to take on one final hit before retiring for good. Billy actually lampshades how he has seen this trope many times in movies, and how in those movies the last job always goes bad. This turns out to be very prophetic.
- Panicky Expectant Father: Discussed; Billy compares himself to "one of those expectant fathers in an old cartoon" as he anxiously paces the apartment while Alice reads the story he wrote so far.
- Pants-Pulling Prank: In his story, Billy recalls how he used this to retaliate against a bully at school. It led to the bully himself becoming the subject of ridicule.
- Pædo Hunt: The fact that Roger Klerke likes to have sex with underage girls, and one time even went so far as to get himself a preteen girl, is reason for Alice to agree to help Billy lure him into a trap and kill him. She even outright states Klerke deserves to die, a fate she didn't even wish on her own rapists when Billy punished them.
- Rape as Drama: Billy first encounters Alice after she has been gang-raped.
- Real Life Writes the Plot: King initially wrote the book as taking place in 2020. Then the COVID-19 Pandemic happened. As a result much of the story would have been unworkable (at one point a few characters leave to go on a cruise) and King ended up changing the events of the novel to take place in 2019. Some references are made to how the virus will plague the world several months after the events of the story.
- Single Tear: Nick sheds one when Billy has him at his mercy in his own house.
- Spanner in the Works: Billy's plan after the assassination of Allen is to lay low for a while in an apartment he rented under a false identity that even Nick is unaware of, and then get out of the city once the heat dies down. The plan is cut short however when one night a drunk and unconscious Alice is dropped from a van by the men that raped her, in front of the apartment building. Billy brings her into the apartment to get her out of the rain, mostly because if he leaves her outside in the rain she will no doubt get noticed by passersby that will call the police, who will then visit his apartment to find any witnesses to the crime. But now that he has done that, his plan is screwed anyway since there's now a real risk Alice will recognize him and turn him in. Fortunately for him, that does not happen.
- Spotting the Thread: Billy is suspicious from the start about this last job he has been given due to Nick's behaviour, like the fact that Nick offers Billy an escape plan for after the assassination (something he never did before, and Billy never needed). It ultimately turns out Billy was Properly Paranoid since Nick turns on Billy the moment Allen is killed. In hindsight, Billy realizes there was another tell-tale sign that he missed—Nick let his close associate Giorgio Piglielli handle most of the work while Nick himself stayed in the background (and thus became harder to link to the assassination by the police), something he also never did before.
- Tap on the Head: Deconstructed. Billy's narration notes how serious head wounds are, when he hits a goon on the head, and then the goon hits his head again on the way down. Later information he receives indicates that the goon is profoundly brain-damaged.
- We Need a Distraction: Nick arranges for two of his goons to set off flashpots immediately after Billy kills Allen to cause chaos which Billy can use to escape the scene. Ken Hoff, who supplied Billy with the gun, also adds a distraction by creating a warehouse fire in the nearby town of Cody, though he apparently did this without Nick's consent.
- Win Her a Prize: Despite being told to lay low and only get slightly acquainted with his neighbors, Billy actually becomes good friends with the family next door, the Ackermans. This results in them inviting him to the Labor Day weekend carnival, where Billy easily wins Shanice Ackerman a huge, stuffed flamingo in the shooting gallery. Only afterwards does he realize his mistake since he just showed the Ackermans he is quite the marksman.
- Write What You Know: Nick actually namedrops the trope when he and Billy discuss the fact that Billy is actually trying to write a book while he waits for his target. Since the pages that Billy wrote so far are indeed about something from his own life (the incident in which his sister was killed), the fact that Nick brings up this trope is enough proof for Billy that Nick is monitoring the laptop he gave him.
