Less a Hitman book and more a compilation of worrying fantasies vaguely connected by the presence of a character labelled as 47. It’s like a fan fic, but written by someone who read reviews of the games.
It can be safely be said that the Hitman movies are objectively awful, yet they are both sublime masterpieces in comparison to this book – which distils the worst elements of the early game then displays a complete contempt for the rest at a conceptual level.
The story has a complete absence of tension, both due to pacing issues and the baffling assumption that in a world with competing international assassination agencies – everyone who works for the agencies directly or indirectly must be staggeringly incompetent. Some of the plot twists could come straight out of an episode of Archer.
Approximately fifty percent of the story is spent on a side mission that focuses on trying to be shocking for the sake of shock. The book also has a strange tendency to refer to items by their brand name, then later have details wrong. Plot points are also put forward and forgotten in later chapters – resulting in an unsatisfying ending that resolves little and feels like it was more the result of a word target than planning.
On top of this the book spends more time describing and exploring the history of a single female character’s naked body than it ever does any aspect of the ICA (referred to only as “The Agency”), 47, his equipment or methodology. The most stressed point seems to be 47 uses a DOVO brand straight razor.
There’s also a creepy fixation of threatening women with what could only described as extreme nipple torture (men just get regular torture regardless of their crimes or the situation).
Overall it’s a story that forgoes exploring anything from the world of 47 to instead favour instead a poor imitation professional criminal story more akin to the adventures of Richard Stark’s Parker than the globe trotting adventures of a genetically engineered super assassin who has a barcode on the back of his bald head.
Spoilers follow
Continue reading I read: Hitman – The Enemy Within by William C. Dietz