In this one, assassins pose as interns in prestigious companies in order to kill executives. The idea is that interns are invisible. They work right under everyone's nose and no one remembers their name. At the same time, they can gain all kinds of access by doing work vitally necessary for the functioning of the company but so boring and tedious that no one getting paid wants to do it.
It's presented as a kind of handbook with rules and tips, written by John, an assassin about to retire, for newbie assassins to read. Instead of just a series of rules, he walks the newbies through his last assignment, pointing out rules as necessary. So it ends up being like a memoir, where we get the story of his last job and the story of his life. Meanwhile, there is a second framing device where this handbook has been intercepted by the FBI and is being sent to field agents.
I've gone full cycle with this one. I had a lot of fun during the six or so hours it took me to read it. But when I was done and started thinking about it, it stopped making any sense at all. Then I started to think that maaaaybe this weirdness was intentional.
Let's start with the plot holes. Why, once John has continuously screwed up the super important job and proved himself untrustworthy, does his boss insist that (even though he'd usually kill him) John can't be replaced mid job, even though the job was switching to phase two and it would have been a perfect opportunity to change guys? Why would the FBI agent offer to help John find his father, and how did John manage to give her enough information to do that without blowing his cover? Just. What? As I was reading, I assumed this was hand-wavy on the part of the author to keep the plot chugging along. I rolled my eyes and moved on. Towards the end of the novel, it turned out that most of these plot holes were holes in the narrative to manipulate John. People were lying to him and even in the world of the novel this doesn't make sense. That meant the author had covered himself, filling in his own plot holes. But then...John's supposed to be the best. If I picked up that something was screwy, why didn't he?
Then John consistently breaks his own rules, screwing himself over in the process and repeatedly messing up the job. There's many examples, but let's stick with the big rule: to stay unnoticed. That's the premise of the book. He breaks it almost immediately and then keeps breaking it throughout the book. He contradicts himself in other ways too. For example, he says that his early development has made him incapable of having feelings or strong emotions, which makes him such a good assassin. But then he gets downright tearful at least twice.
Then I start to wonder. Who is this handbook even for? By the time the book is over, the newbie assassins would have heard of him and how he completely bungled this job. He even embarrasses himself in front of them at one point in the story. Does he actually expect these people to read his memoir when he sends it to them?
And this is where things almost start making sense again, because Yes. Yes, he does.
He's so deluded that he thinks people will want to read his crazy manifesto. He doesn't realize that he actually does have emotions or that that contradicts anything he's said. He thinks he's the best of the best, even after missing giant red flags and screwing things up over and over.
That's part of what this book does really well. Every now and then there are transcripts provided by the FBI. Afterwards, it will go back to the handbook, where John will summarize the conversation in a way that it most definitely did not go down. Some conversations he won't mention at all. It's clear that he is completely full of shit.
The FBI part comes through in another way too. John addresses the junior assassins several times with the second person "you." However, the stuff he says does not describe me at all. It throws the reader out of the narrative, but then the FBI framework catches the reader as they're thrown out. John's not talking to me. He's talking to newbie assassins and I'm listening in. It sets up a sense of voyeurism that works remarkably well.
So, it was really hard to tell how much was intentional and how much was me trying to reason through this one. I'm going to go with that it was intentional, because I don't like giving bad reviews.
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