The kills - Richard House

Longlisted for the Man Booker Prize 2013.
Shortlisted for the South Bank Sky Arts Awards 2014.

This is The Kills: Sutler, The Massive, The Kill, The Hit.

The Kills is an epic novel of crime and conspiracy told in four books.

It begins with a man on the run and ends with a burned body.

Moving across continents, characters and genres, there will be no more ambitious or exciting novel in 2013.

In a ground-breaking collaboration between author and publisher, Richard House has also created multimedia content that takes you beyond the boundaries of the book and into the characters' lives outside its pages. This material and much more can be found on http://www.thekills.co.uk.

Plot summary:

Camp Liberty is an unmanned staging-post in Amrah province, Iraq; the place where the detritus of the war is buried, incinerated, removed from memory. Until, suddenly, plans are announced to transform it into the largest military base in the country, codenamed the Massive, with a post-war strategy to convert the site for civilian use.

Contracted by HOSCO, the insidious company responsible for overseeing the Massive, Rem Gunnerson finds himself unwittingly commanding a disparate group of economic mercenaries at Camp Liberty when the mysterious Stephen Lawrence Sutler arrives. As the men are played against each other by HOSCO the situation grows increasingly tense. And then everything changes. An explosion. An attack on a regional government office. When the dust settles it emerges that Sutler has disappeared, and over fifty million dollars of reconstruction funds are missing.

Sutler finds himself accused and on the run. Gunnerson and his men want revenge for months of abuse and misinformation. Out of the chaos a man named Paul Geezler rises to restore order, a man more involved than he's willing to admit.

And then there's the vicious murder of an American student in Italy. A murder that replicates exactly the details of a well-known novel.