The Killer is Dying

Written by James Sallis

Narrated by Ken Marks

Shortlisted for the Anthony, Nebula, Edgar, Shamus, and Gold Dagger Awards, best-selling author James Sallis is a master of the gritty crime drama. The Killer Is Dying tracks the fortunes of three men of vastly different ages, backgrounds, and ambitions. Though they never meet, a hired killer on his last job, a burned out detective, and a young boy plagued by nightmares have their lives intersect in compelling ways in the scorching metropolis of Phoenix, Arizona.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Recorded Books, Inc.
• Release date: Jul 13, 2012
• ISBN: 9781470324049

James Sallis

James Sallis has published fourteen novels, multiple collections of short stories, poems and essays, the definitive biography of Chester Himes, three books of musicology, and a translation of Raymond Queneau's novel Saint Glinglin. The film of Drive won Best Director award at Cannes; the six Lew Griffin books are in development. Jim plays guitar, banjo, mandolin, fiddle and Dobro both solo and with the band Three-Legged Dog.

Reviews for The Killer is Dying

[stanski_2 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

OK, I'll start out by saying I am not sure if I even understood this storyline. Three characters, all quite different, but interconnected in some mysterious way.Are there really three characters, or are the intertwined references to hospice, dolls, dreams, and blogs all part of some combined humanity?James Sallis is certainly a talented writer, sometimes even poetic in his language. Sorry that it didn't work better for me.

[cherilove · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

When I read the description of this book, I was OK with the fact that there were three different stories, interwoven, but only implicitly. The actuality of the book was too much. In most of the beginning chapters, at least, it is very difficult to figure out who the narrator is, and the frequent use of the bare pronoun "he" is no help. This is probably the author's intentional artistry, but was a no-go for me. The killer died for me at about page 20.

[jim53_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Christian is an old man who is hired to perform a killing, but finds that someone else has made an attempt on the life of his intended victim. Dale (really?) Sayles is a tired detective with a dying wife. Jimmie is a clever young boy whose parents have left him living alone. The three are connected in mysterious ways, including dreams. It appears that Jimmie is experiencing Christian's dreams, although I didn't pick up on this early enough to track it thoroughly. The book is all atmosphere, and very well written. An attentive re-read might uncover more of what Sallis is up to, but my pile is too big for that to happen soon.The book is lovely, dark, and deepBut I have promises to keepAnd books to read before I sleep.

[datrappert · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

This book sits at the junction between Sallis's love for noir fiction and his desire to write something much more complex. It isn't a busy junction, since few writers have the combination of talents that Sallis does. A dying hitman tries to figure out what went wrong with his most recent hit--MINOR SPOILER--someone else beat him to it. Sallis weaves together the thoughts of the hitman, the two detectives who are trying to solve the murder, and a teenager living alone whose dreams are mysteriously tied to those of the hit man. I'm not quite sure what to make of that connection, so I'll leave you to draw your own conclusion. Each of these threads is interesting, and Sallis's writing is always effective and frequently poetic. It all takes place in Phoenix, where Sallis now lives, and the atmosphere is well done.While there is a plot here, this is not a typical crime novel by any means. It is really an impressionistic story where the individual parts are perhaps more important than the whole. It is a novel that, I suspect, would reveal even more nuances through a second reading.

[cathyskye · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

This book read like I was on pain meds. Extremely well-written sections floating in and out of focus with me never quite sure which character was being talked about. I think this reading experience was more a case of me not being in the right mood for the book than the book not being right for me. I normally love Sallis's writing, so I'm not going to give this one an abysmally low grade.

[sleahey_3 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Three points of view that don't connect very well make this a difficult audiobook to follow, since it wasn't always clear which narrator was speaking. In the end, the resolution seemed incomplete somehow.

[macygma · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Someone kills Christian’s target. He is one of the best and suddenly someone else is doing his jobs. Detectives Sayles and Graves buried in their own personal issues are tracking the killer but are they really? Jimmie is a virtual orphan. Mom left the family early-on and Dad follows in a few years, leaving Jimmie alone but pretty darn self-sufficient. He reads every read to folks in a home every week (sometimes kid’s books, sometimes not) has everyone fooled except the neighbor who made him early on but kept his secret. Jimmie is also having the killer’s dreams. Christian is dying – terminal cancer - but is determined to find his imposter before he goes. Sayles wife is in a hospice – also cancer and will not allow him to visit which is tearing him apart. Graves is worried about his partner. This novel is well-written and the characters are quite intriguing. Still, I kept getting lost in the every chapter character changes until I once gave up and put it aside for a while. However, it kept calling me back so I went back and finished it. Glad I did. The coming together of this book shows us the real talent that lies in Mr. Sallism writer also of Drive, and the ending will leave you wondering…..for quite a while.

[crazybatcow · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

It's well-written. Nice prose. Perhaps an interesting concept...but...There's something missing here. There's not really a plot (even though there's a tiny mystery) and there's not really a protagonist you can relate to since we just pop in and out of their stories. It's not noir. It's not a detective novel. Perhaps it was a spiritual novel? I'm not sure... there's no religion in it, but there's some sense of how each person's life can swirl out of control and only faith that things will be as they are can get them through?Yeah. It was too deep for me. (And, if it wasn't meant to be deep, it was completely pointless 'cause there was no noticeable plotline.)

[joeltallman · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

The three intertwined stories here are strands in a meditation on life and death--in particular, as one might guess from the title, the latter. There is a detective story in that two detectives are looking for an attempted murderer; there is a mystery in that one of the characters is a killer-for-hire mysteriously robbed of his victim. But if you enter this book looking for either a detective story or a mystery novel, you will be disappointed. The characters are fully realized, but only in ways that illuminate their grief, their abandonment, and their attempts to find some kind of order or meaning in it all before it's too late. The mysticism in the idea of a young boy sharing the dreams of Christian, the killer of the title, might be off-putting to those who prefer their realism without the magical. And those themes of death and abandonment are a heavy load to bear. But each short chapter moves at a streamlined pace, and the whole is sustained by Sallis's spare, poetic writing.

[norinrad10 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

First let me say this is a very well written book, but for the life of me I couldn't keep track of what was going on. Beautiful written passages that created vivid pictures left me going, huh? I believe the book is about a man who has taken many a life a life having his taken from him by life, but I remain uncertain. For lovers of prose, I recommend. If its all about the story, you might want to pass.

[debavp · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

I’ll be honest, I’m still not sure what this was all about. The pace was frustratingly slow and quite jerky. Too many different, seemingly unrelated characters and situations. You know there has to be something that ties it all together, but I never found it.

[dablackwood · Rating: 1 out of 5 stars]

This was one of the most confusing books I've ever read. I had no idea at the beginning of a new chapter who the characters were. I guess that this was a technique that the author wanted to try out. Sadly it did not work for me. I was totally adrift in a book with no real action and characters whose motivation was unclear. I like a book that lets me discover information slowly, but this book never worked for me.

[jjking_1 · Rating: 1 out of 5 stars]

I have a friend who said "If a book does not hook you w/in the first 50 pages its not worth her time"...w/this in mind...did at least try the first 100...could not read it.One chapter I would get into then change to different story...getting into that story...next chapter change again...maybe I'll pick it up again the finish it...but for now...moving on to next book...not worth my time

[mariecg · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

"The Killer Is Dying" intertwines the stories of three persons: a killer for hire, a detective whose wife is dying and a boy living by himself after his parents left.The three characters are linked but they never meet. The idea of the book was really interesting and could have given a great book.Sadly, that's not what happened.. At the start of each chapter it was often confusing and hard to distinguish the character it was about. It may even take a few paragraphs before it becomes clear. But for me, the worst part was that all along I was waiting for something to happen, really happen. But at the end, the solution to the mystery is told, not shown. Detectives might be used to it, but this mystery reader does not like it.

[velopunk · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

I found this book unsatisfying and hurried. The book is about a contract killer, the detective hunting him and an abandoned boy living on his own after his parents disappear. Each of the characters could be very interesting if they were more fleshed out. The hitman has a pre-med and Viet Nam background, the detective's wife is dying and has left him to go into hospice care, Jimmie, the abandoned boy, lives in his parents house and makes his living selling items on the Internet and tries to fly below the radar of the school and social welfare agencies. Yes, the hitman is also dying and is trying to find out why his last target was shot by somebody other than him. Their world's intersect as the novel progresses, but in the end, I didn't feel that I knew each character sufficiently.

[charlesboyd · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I've taken a number of writing classes taught by Jim Sallis, the author of The Killer is Dying. This novel illustrates many of the ideas he teaches. He frequently advises us to "trust the reader." By that, he means that a writer doesn't have to tell every little detail, readers are smart, they can fill in the gaps and many of them like to do just that. This sometimes makes his novels challenging to read. In The Killer is Dying, it's not immediately clear which character is the focus in each new chapter. Is it Christian, the hit man, Sayles the detective trying to find out who tried to kill Rankin--Christian had the job, but someone beat him to it--or Jimmie, the fourteen-year-old boy living on his own, making his living via the internet? So, as another reviewer suggested, this novel will have more to reveal with another reading, or even several. Don't pick up The Killer is Dying expecting an easy read, approach it as you would a classic, ready to give it full attention. Jim also says that beginning writers or even some published writers, lesser writers, just want to tell the story, go from point a to point b, that they don't give much of what he calls "the surround." There's tons of atomsphere in this novel and his others. When Sayles is in the hospital checking on Rankin, talking to him, you're put into the hospital, you feel it, hear the sounds, smell the smells, see what's happening around him. There's a whole world around each character, not just his part of that world.His novels, though nominally mysteries or crime novels, are really more about people trying to figure out life than about any plot. Several LibraryThing reviewers note that the writing in this novel is often poetic. Jim considered himself a poet for much of the early part of his forty-plus years writing, sucessfully publishing poetry. The Killer is Dying, at 232 pages is one of Jim' longest novels--most of them weighing in at under 200 pages--not surprising given his background in poetry. He often tells students to look at their writing and to ask what work each word, each sentence, each paragraph does. If it doesn't do any work or even just doesn't do enough work, he recommends getting rid of it.Sallis is a fine writer more interested in being the best writer he can be than in how much money he could make writing lesser novels. Interestingly, he's much more popular in Europe than in the United States.

[coker74 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

I have to agree with what a couple of the other reviewers have written. I found The Killer Is Dying disjointed in places. Some of the chapters were wonderfully written while others seemed to belong in another place and time. I realize I am not an author, just an average reader, and I really wanted to like this book, but I couldn't.

[ckgs_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Three males converge:Christian, Vietnam veteran, goes by the nickname he received while serving in Vietnam. A hired hit man with a terminal disease, Christian has a contract on John Rankin but someone else attempts to murder Rankin before Christian can shoot him. Already living longer than expected, Christian wants to understand the meaning of his life as a contract killer. “How many dead and dying men had he stood above or beside? And death, finally, wasn’t all that interesting. What was interesting, what never failed to surprise and amaze him, is the way life always holds on, whatever the circumstances, how it just won’t let go.”Jimmie, abandoned by his parents, lives on the toys he buys and sells on the Internet, living a life he never expected to last. “At first he had waited, living off what was left, canned food, cereal, expecting someone to show up at the door, a neighbor school officials, police. But no one did. So then, still expecting to be exposed any day, he’d gone on to work with what he had. Now he found it difficult to imagine another life, another way of living.” Jimmie learns while living on his own that, “Your day needs structure.” He has built a life for himself by volunteering at the local retirement home and Mrs. Flores, his neighbor can be counted on in an emergency.Detective Graves and Sayles are investigating the shooting of John Rankin. Sayles’ wife, Josie is dying and has gone into hospice care. Sayles says “Strength was not about overcoming things. Strength was about accepting them.”Sayles is unknowingly looking for Christian, while Jimmie dreams about Christian’s memories.

[travis1259 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

The Killer is Dying gives a most unusual look from three characters,all different, to distinguish this novel from many others. But, for my money that approach failed. Because of three protagonists, I never really got the feel of where the mystery was going. And, that's a shame because Sallis writes marvelouse prose. His seemingly effortlessly simple sentences contain a great deal of his philosophy and vision. So, its hard for me to rate this book. I admire the writing, but find the actual execution unfortunate. Maybe he should stay away from fiction. I surely got muddled towards the end. Sometimes less really is more. Maybe someday he will write a novel with one central character that will highlight his ability instead of having it clouded with what seems like a gimmick. But, I do recommend this book if only for the pure writing skills it show cases.

[tlryan1 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

I wanted to like this book but it was really only okay. The book is told from the perspectives of three different men, a cop with a wife in hospice care, a teen who has been abandoned by his parents, and a hit man. The stories interlink but the overall storyline was not satisfying and it was difficult to follow as the perspectives changed I prefer my mysteries to be more straightforward with the loose ends tied up but this would appeal to those who prefer more abstract works.