Ronald De Feo – författare

Narrated from the perspective of an American-born contract killer based in London, Calling Mr. King takes us into the mind and life of a man who is growing both increasingly cautious and distracted as he travels from job to job, city to city. Though long considered a first-rate, consistently reliable marksman with a cool, unshakable personality, he appears to be undergoing a severe change of character and focus, taking an interest as never before in the world beyond his targets. He regards such a shift, which is marked by an unexpected passion for buildings and architecture, as an energizing deviation from his deadly routine. But he also begins to realize that it is a dangerously unwise trajectory for a man in his profession.

Set in London, Paris, New York, and Barcelona, this novel is at once a colorful, suspenseful tale of escape laced with dark humor, a story of altered perception and self-education, and a psychological self-portrait of a character who is attempting, against the odds, to become someone else.

This is a dark yet often funny novel told from the point of view of a man who for the past two months has been a patient at a New York City mental ward. Having suffered a breakdown—due to his shattered marriage and an irrational fear of fading away as a human—he now finds himself caught between two worlds, neither of which is a place of comfort or fulfillment: the world of the ward, where abnormality and an odd sort of freedom reign, and the outside world, where convention and restrictive behavior rule. Finally on his way to becoming reasonably "normal" again, he requests and is granted a "solo pass," which allows him to leave the locked ward for several hours and visit the city, with the promise that he will return to the hospital by evening.

As he prepares for his excursion, we get a picture of the ward he will temporarily leave behind—the staff and the patients, notably Mandy Reed, a schizophrenic and nymphomaniac who has become his closest friend there.

Solo Pass is an unsettling satire that depicts, with inverted logic, the difficulties of madness and normalcy.