Louis Begley (Memories of a Marriage) turns to crime fiction in this tale about the lengths to which a person will go to dispense vigilante justice.
Jack Dana is well on his way to an academic career when the attacks of September 11 force a reassessment. In the spirit of his late father, who served in Vietnam, Jack joins the Marines and goes to Afghanistan, where he is wounded. Back in the U.S., he writes a wildly successful novel based on his experiences and moves to New York City under the protective eye of his Uncle Harry, a lawyer at a white-shoe firm. When Jack returns from an extended stay in Brazil, where he'd been working on his next novel, he learns that Harry is dead--an apparent suicide, triggered, according to his former partners, by his increasing dementia and forced retirement. With the help of Harry's gifted young associate Kerry, who soon becomes his girlfriend, Jack pieces together the facts and soon concludes that Harry was murdered, implicating the law firm and its very well connected Texan client.
Harkening back to his wartime experience, Jack is driven by his need for personal justice, choosing to flush out the killer on his own despite the risks to himself and to Kerry. How he will snare his enemy, at what cost and whether he can satisfy his need for vengeance become the story's central questions. Killer, Come Hither combines unexpected plot twists and narrative tension with Begley's trademark elegant prose. It is a somewhat uneven but still pleasurable twist on a crime novel. --Jeanette Zwart, freelance writer and reviewer