THE KILLER IS DYING

Perhaps deliberately, narrator Ken Marks barely changes tone when moving from one isolated character to the next. An attentive listener must draw clues from the context as Marks moves between lives of three disparate males—a terminally ill killer-for-hire who is on his last job, a policeman who is coping with a dying spouse, and a high school student left on his own who sells household items on the Internet to survive. The student is plagued by the dreams of the killer, and the cops are inadvertently drawn into his life as well. No one plays the role one would expect, which is why Marks’s straightforward, gravel-voiced narration suits Sallis’s grim noir. D.P.D. © AudioFile 2012, Portland, Maine [Published: MARCH 2012]