Dark Men

At the start of Haas’s solid third Silver Bear thriller (after 2009’s Columbus), the assassin known as Columbus, who spent his youth “incarcerated in a juvenile detention center” outside Boston, has retired to a seaside Italian village with his rare-book dealer lover, Risina Lorenzana. Then Columbus learns that his former fence, Archibald Grant, has been kidnapped, and that a ransom note demands Columbus’s return to the U.S. as part of the deal. Back in the U.S., Columbus encounters a collector of skulls who is somehow connected to the abduction; kills a man who’s contracted to eliminate the skull collector; watches as an associate of Grant is murdered by a falling scaffold; and becomes involved with a hit man named Spilatro, whose specialty is concocting “death by accident”—and who warns him that “dark men,” CIA operatives, are behind all the mayhem. Poetic prose helps propel a plot that loses some steam toward the end, but Haas keeps readers guessing throughout. (Dec.)