Kill Me

Alan Gregory, Book 14

By: Stephen White

Narrated by: Dick Hill

Length: 12 hrs and 13 mins

Publisher's summary

Throw out everything you think you know about twists, turns, and surprises.

Get ready for the next big thing.

Get ready to meet the Death Angels.

We've all been there. A loved one or a dear friend becomes desperately ill or is tragically injured. Someone - maybe even you - says, "If that ever happens to me, I wish someone would just . . . kill me."

What if you could choose when to die? But once you decide, you can't change your mind - ever.

Welcome to the next step in the evolution of suspense fiction, an in-your-face/what-would-you-do topical thriller. Kill Me is a brilliantly conceived roller-coaster ride that zeros in on some of the most contentious issues of our time.

Kill Me brings Alan Gregory face-to-face with the most challenging case of his career. As always, White's characters are indelible and the dialogue is dead-on, but Kill Me is fresh and thought-provoking in a way that's so uncommon in crime fiction. Kill Me delivers on all the promise of White's earlier work and then raises the bar in an unforgettably inventive tale of life and death. This is the book that you won't be able to stop listening to, but more to the point, this is the book that won't go away. Listeners will be asking each other: "What would you do? If you could sign up - really - would you?"

©2005 Joe Halderman (P)2006 Brilliance Audio, Inc.

Critic reviews

"Bizarre, thrilling, and oh so much fun." ( Booklist)
"A thinking person's thriller." (Jeffery Deaver)
"Hill masters the quirky moments of this thriller with just the right amount of irony and dread." ( AudioFile)

Fast moving book!

I really enjoyed "kill me". Dick hill is a great narrator, he did a superb job. The story line was interesting, occasionally venturing into the slightly unbelievable. But the book kept my attention all the way to the end. I would recommend it!

wow.

a concept that many have asked themselves. what would you do, given the resources? hmmm

Great listen!

This is an interesting and thought-provoking book. A friend recommended it to me and I wasn’t sure at first but I really enjoyed it and it had some interesting topics and themes. Definitely a great performance from the narrator as well.

Great story, great reader

For the past 20 years I've followed Stephen White's Alan Gregory series - always interesting and well-written stories. Having read "Kill Me" as a hardcover when it was originally published about five years ago, I thought I'd like to revisit this very special thriller again as an audiobook and spent a credit on it.

Well, I think Dick Hill did a marvelous performance on the audio version of this very clever thriller. Just lean back and enjoy the ride - this is how all novels should be transferred to audio.

What a great book!

At first I was afraid I would not like an Alan Gregory book that didn’t feature much of the character. Boy, was I wrong!
This book was very imaginative and a plot I’ve never heard of before. I really enjoyed it. The characters were all interesting. The pace of the book was both slow when needed and fast as can be, as needed.
I will reflect on this book for hours to come.

Excellent Read

I struggled to stop listening. Thank God for books on audio. Excellent story and narration.

Best Stephen White book so far

This book was not written from Alan Gregory's viewpoint. It was about a philosophy of death that may have occurred to all of us -- but would have never had the courage to implement. I was tied to the book for the entire second half. Since I listen to the books, I can also comment on Dick Hill's narration. It has improved greatly since the first Alan Gregory book in the series.

Very depressing -- not much of a thriller

Probably not a good time for me to listen to this one -- with three friends/family members suffering end-stage diseases, it hit a little too close to home. I couldn't help seeing them, and all of us, in the pages of this flawed "thriller". (I suggest reader caution for anyone in similar circumstances. This one is too much for any of us anticipating loss.)

It didn't start well. It took me the first four hours to finally come to the conclusion that Dr. Alan Gregory was not going to make more than a walk-on performance. I'd picked this book specifically because I like the Gregory books -- I was looking forward to more chapters about Alan, Lauren, Sam Purdy and even Emily. None of that happened, so I was disappointed from the beginning.

Even after I'd adjusted to the fact that this was just going to be a run of the mill novel, I was grinding my teeth. Tell you what: keep count of the number of times the wealth of the people involved is stated, emphasized, referred to, then restated and restated again. Get someone to pay you a dollar for each "wealth" reference, and you could retire -- or hire someone to kill you, if you'd prefer. After all, who wants to continue living as a senior citizen? All the thrills in life are gone -- no more "heli" skiing, deep sea dives, nothing left to live for.

But here we have a protagonist who loves his family so much that in his dying days -- he's a dead duck, one way or another -- he engages in a cross-country search for his prodigal teenage son, a young man he never knew existed until a few months prior. Leaving his long suffering wife and biological child behind, he takes his lover along -- one of his intended killers. Wow, what a man, huh? What compassion!

Other than the fact that in the last half of the book he spends his time trying to outwit the killers he himself hired, there's not much thrill here, only depression. Each event -- driving on a road, eating a food -- he regards as his last, all the while carrying on about the upcoming loss of his family, even as he leaves them alone, time and time again.

I dunno -- I didn't like this book. Part of it is just me, I admit that. But another part is that I think it's a flawed concept, carried out by a marginally disgusting protagonist who keeps insisting that he's doing it all for his family, but clearly is doing nothing but satisfying himself. Feh. Next time? I'll be sure I'm getting a book that will continue the saga of Emily the Bouvier instead of an incredibly wealthy -- -- playboy weeping into his imported bottled water.

Depressong Long, Long, Long Book

I normally do not like to write bad reviews on a book, nut this book falls short of his other books. I listened to until the end hoping it would get better. But it never did, maybe it was because of the subject matter.