Excerpt from The Anomaly by Hervé Le Tellier , plus links to reviews, author biography & more

One evening in a bar, a—very drunk—man tells him he wants to have someone killed. The guy probably has a good reason, a work thing, a woman thing, but that doesn't matter to Blake.

"Would you do it, would you, for money?"

"You're nuts," Blake replies. "Completely nuts."

"I'd pay you, a lot."

The figure he offers has three zeros. Blake laughs.

"No. Are you kidding?"

Blake sips his drink, slowly, takes his time. The man's collapsed onto the bar. Blake shakes him.

"Listen, I know someone who'll do it. For twice that. I never met him. Tomorrow I'll tell you how to contact him, but after that, you never mention him to me again, okay?" And that night Blake invents Blake. For William Blake, whom he read after having seen the film Red Dragon with Anthony Hopkins, and because he likes one of the poems: "Into the dangerous world I leapt: / Helpless, naked, piping loud; / Like a fiend hid in a cloud." And the word "Blake" itself, lake but with a hint of black, yeah, it was on the right track.

The next day a North American service provider registers the email address of one blake.mick.22, set up in an internet café in Geneva. Blake pays cash to a stranger for a secondhand laptop, buys an old Nokia and a prepaid card, a camera, and a telephoto lens. Once he has his equipment, the apprentice chef gives the guy from the bar the contact details for this Blake, "but there's no guarantee the address is still valid," and he waits. Three days later the man sends Blake a convoluted message that makes it clear he's being cautious. Questioning. Looking for the chink in the armor. Sometimes leaving a couple of days between messages. Blake refers to the target, to logistics and delivery times, and his precautions succeed in reassuring the man. They reach an agreement, and Blake asks for half the fee in advance: that alone is four zeros. When the man explains that he wants it to look like "natural causes," Blake doubles the sum and insists on having a month. Now convinced that he's dealing with a professional, the man accepts all the conditions.

It's the first time, and Blake is making this up. He's already extremely meticulous, cautious, and imaginative. He's watched so many films—no one realizes how much hit men owe to Hollywood scriptwriters. From the start of his career, he arranges to receive the fee and contract information in a plastic bag left in a place chosen by him, a bus, a fast-food outlet, a building site, a garbage can, a park. He'll avoid anywhere too remote, where he'd be the only person visible, and anywhere too public, where he wouldn't be able to identify anyone. He'll be there hours ahead of time, scanning the area. He'll wear gloves, a hood, a hat, and glasses; he'll dye his hair, learn to fit a wig, to hollow his cheeks, or puff them out; he'll have license plates by the dozen, from every country. With time, Blake will take up knife throwing, half spins and full spins depending on the distance; he'll take up bomb making, and extracting undetectable poison from jellyfish; he'll know how to dismantle and reassemble a Browning 9 mm and a Glock 43 in a few seconds; he'll be paid and will buy his weapons in bitcoin, a cryptocurrency whose movements can't be traced. He'll set up his site on the dark web, which will come to feel like a game to him. Because there are tutorials for absolutely everything on the internet. Just have to search.

So, his target is a man of about fifty. Blake has his photo and his name but decides to call him Ken. Yes, like Barbie's husband. A good choice: "Ken" doesn't grant him a full existence.

Ken lives alone, and that's a good start, Blake thinks to himself, because he can't see how he'd find the opportunity with a married man with three children. The problem remains that at Ken's sort of age, a natural death doesn't leave many options: car crash, gas leak, heart attack, accidental fall. Period. Blake doesn't yet have the skill set for sabotaging brakes or tampering with steering, any more than he knows how to get hold of potassium chloride to trigger a heart attack; as for gas asphyxiation, that doesn't smell right either. Let's go with a fall. Ten thousand deaths a year. Particularly the elderly, but he'll work with it. And even though Ken's no athlete, a fight is out of the question.

Originally published in French as L'Anomalie in 2020 by Éditions Gallimard, Paris
Copyright ©2020 Éditions Gallimard
English translation copyright ©2021 Other Press