Beat the Reaper

I was asked to read this book's last couple of chapters—the story of an ex-hitman working as a doctor in the witness protection scheme—as I had unwittingly written a scene similar to Josh's in the second Ben Koenig book, Nobody's Hero.

I ended up devouring the whole book in a single sitting. It had everything. It was violent, incredibly funny, and packed with the kind of medical insider knowledge that could only ever have been written by a surgeon.

It's pretty gross in places, and the scene we'd both inadvertently written was shocking (I changed mine), but it enhances… show more.

A savage, icepick of a hitman novel that will bury itself in your cerebellum. It’s a slippery, sexy book about the making and subsequent unmaking of a contract killer, complete with all the usual trappings and a few resolutely unusual ones. halfway through this novel, I realized that there weren't any rules to this. That you just built humans from scratch and turned them loose in your world and whatever they did, they did.  A guy stabs someone with his own fibula in this book. Eat that Macgyver. 

Easily my favorite book ever—one I’ve read or listened to five times—Reaper is a fictional imagining of the double-life of a medical resident at a fictional New York hospital. It is entirely convincing, since Bazell was actually a medical resident (at the University of California San Francisco Medical Center) when he wrote it. Don’t ask me how a resident finds the time to write, but boy did he knock this one out of the park! Reaper is the story of Peter Brnwa (Brown), son of Jewish/Polish war victims, who becomes a mob hitman after being informally adopted by his… show more.