"The Hitman's Guide to Housecleaning" Bargain Kindle Books

Brief of "The Hitman's Guide to Housecleaning" Kindle Book :
With some 66 hits under his belt, Tomislav Bokšić, or Toxic, has a flawless record as hitman for the Croatian mafia in New York. That is, until he kills the wrong guy and is forced to flee the States, leaving behind the life he knows and loves. Suddenly, he finds himself on a plane hurtling toward Reykjavik, Iceland, borrowing the identity of an American televangelist named Father Friendly. With no means of escape from this island devoid of gun shops and contract killing, tragicomic hilarity ensues as he is forced to come to terms with his bloody past and reevaluate his future.

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53 of 54 people found the following review helpful.

Strangely beautiful


By sanoe.net

Hallgrimur Helgason is a writer that I will have to put on my list of authors to look out for.

"The Hitman's Guide to Housecleaning" is the first kindle book that I have ever read from this Icelandic writer. I made sure to see who did the translation and it appears that Helgason did his own translation which makes this story about a Croatian hitman who makes the wrong hit even more remarkable to me.

The story's premise is simple enough. Tomislav "Toxic" Boksic is a hitman for the Croatian mob in NYC. He has a girlfriend. He has a job that he is good at. He likes his life well enough.

Then he's given an assignment that goes wrong in that his target is FBI. And that makes him an instant target. As such, he flees by assuming the identity of a man he kills in an airport bathroom and he is off to Iceland where there are no guns or prostitution and a very small population.

Even more worrisome, the identity of the man he has assumed is an evangelical preacher who was on his way to make an appearance on television for a local group of evangelical Icelanders.

But if you think that this is just an action/crime thriller. It isn't. Helgason has a gift for the darkly humorous and compassion in odd places. Toxic isn't a good guy but he isn't a guy you want to give up on. He is a weirdly trustworthy narrator and while it seems clear where he is headed, you can't help but hope that maybe it'll end differently. That his sins will be washed away and he can find peace.

The people he meets in his exile are interesting in their quirks and affectations. Sigrudor (or as Toxic calls him 'Sickreader') is the pastor who picks him up. His daughter Grunhilder (or Gunholder) is rebellious but not obnoxious. In between his present, you meet the people in his past. From his childhood, from the war after Yugoslavia broke up, from the mob. It is several stories that make up this one man's life and it is funny and melancholy and bittersweet.

Again, you know, as a reader, where this is all headed but the journey getting there is dark but with flashes of unexpected light that make it strangely beautiful.

20 of 21 people found the following review helpful.

Three and a Half Stars


By G. Messersmith

It is reasonable to assume that a guy called "Toxic" is probably not the nicest guy on the planet and you would be right. In fact, Tomislav Boksic, aka Toxic, is a hitman for the mob in New York City. He claims to have killed 120 something people, some of them in the Bosnian war but 60 something of them as a hitman for the mob. He is on the job and kills the man he is assigned to but to come to find out this guy is an FBI agent and things quickly go downhill from there. He is forced into exile and by unforeseen circumstances winds up killing a TV evangelist, who he looks like, in the bathroom at JFK airport and assuming his identity and winds up in Iceland.

Iceland is unlike anywhere he has ever been before. It has endless days and endless nights, is never truly warm, and has an average zero homicide rate. Further he can't buy a handgun in this country which he desperately misses carrying. He has a lot of difficulty pronouncing the names of the Icelandic citizens so he just turns them into American sounding instead, for example, there's Thordur who he calls Torture, and Guomundur is called Goodmoondoor. He describes the Icelandic national face as "round, with a small nose, like a snowball with a peeble in it" (46).

Needless to say Toxic's past catches up to him in Iceland and he must leave Goodmoondoor's house and go on the run. I won't ruin the kindle book for you but I will tell you that the preacher Goodmoondoor and his fellow preacher Torture decide to save Toxic's soul instead of turning him into the police. The kindle book is pretty funny at times and moves very quickly. The problem I had with it was that I could never really identify with the main character or any of the characters for that matter. It was hard to sympathize with them but I did find myself at the end of the kindle book pulling for Toxic.

17 of 18 people found the following review helpful.

Wow, killer fun, intense, suspenseful


By J. Minatel

Too many times good hitman/killer novels go bad and turn into farce when the killer just shoots everything in sight. Hallgrimur Helgason adeptly avoids that trap. The early portions of the kindle book position the killer Toxic with serious credentials in the Croatian mob, pulling off 67 kills and currently residing in NYC. When one of his assignments goes bad and turns out to be a federal agent, he has to quickly leave the country. His ruthlessness is on display as nothing or no one will get in the way of his escape, which finds him unknowingly killing a man of the cloth and then by necessity, assuming the dead pastor's identity and itinerary.

This is where the story deviates from the traditional mob killer story. The suspense and intensity build not from a string of endless bullets, but from a quiet lack of killer. As Toxic settles in Iceland, he makes friends, lies, is discovered, is healed, makes new friends, and lives a normal life of a retiring killer. At every page turn, I was wondering, who will he kill next, and when? Or when will his former employers pop back into the story and decide he's a loose end?

All of that makes it simultaneously violent enough to satisfy fans of the modern gun for hire genre but thoughtful enough to be unique amongst them. I hope we see more (in English please!) from Hallgrimur Helgason.

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