SLEEPING DOGS

Since his Edgar-winning debut with Butcher's Boy (1982), Perry has inked a series of bold seriocomic thrillers (Metzger's Dog, Big Fish, Island) with ever more guffaws than grit. Here, though, he resurrects the anonymous hit-man hero of Butcher's Boy and sends him on a brawny, bloody vendetta whose rare humor is determinedly dark, even dour. In the decade since he fled to England after killing 20 mobsters in revenge for a double-cross, the ``Butcher's Boy'' has been living a life of cautious ease. One day at the races, though, he's spotted by a young American mafiosi who decides to bag the still-hunted assassin—leading to the would-be capo's instant death and soon to a pitch-black comedy of errors as the killer flies to America to settle with the mobsters he thinks are hot on his trail. A virtual juggernaut of vengeance, he lands in New York, buys a gun, and kills the young mafiosi's boss. He then jets to L.A., where, deplaning, he spots a gunman he assumes is another mafiosi- -and so he zooms on to Santa Fe and kills the head of the West Coast mob. The Butcher Boy then flies to Buffalo to buy a new I.D. but is spotted by yet another mobster, resulting in further carnage. All this gore-giddy mayhem is tethered by rich details of hit-man procedure and by flashbacks of the Butcher Boy's apprentice days, and is spun into unexpected twists by one big plot joke: The man in L.A. was not a mobster but a federal agent put on the killer's tail by his old nemesis, Justice Dept. star Elizabeth Waring. When the Butcher Boy realizes this, he decides to kill Waring—leading to lots more deaths and a tense climax that promises yet another sequel. Tough and energetic, but suffering from a moral black hole at the center: the Butcher Boy himself, a finally unsympathetic antihero whose nonstop killing makes him little more than a thinking person's Terminator.