Menacing, dark psychological thriller
Print Edition
WILLIAM Heming is the proverbial quiet man — nondescript, keeping to himself, mastering “the skill of being likable, but not memorable.” Yet Heming seethes with self-righteous contempt for others and a propensity for vengeance and violence that erupts when he feels threatened, or just irritated.
His employees and clients believe the seemingly unobtrusive Heming leads a boring life, but nothing could be further from the truth in British novelist Phil Hogan’s fascinating dark character study.
Starting as a quiet tale about an odd man, Hogan’s “A Pleasure and a Calling” wastes little time expanding to a clever psychological thriller about a man full of menace.
Heming has owned a successful real estate agency in a “leafy, bustling” British town for 17 years, selling hundreds of houses. And he knows those houses intimately as he has kept the keys to each and has little compunction about visiting when the owners are gone. “I don’t peep through windows. ... I am not a stalker, or a voyeur. I am simply sharing an experience, a life as it happens,” he says.
But, he is oblivious to how creepy he is, helping himself to breakfast at one house, going through checkbooks and diaries at another house, rearranging items at another house.
As for those who are rude to him, or don’t pick up after their dogs, or clip an automobile without leaving a note, Heming is prepared to dismantle their lives from never-ending, unexplained deliveries to being arrested for thefts they didn’t commit.
At first Heming seems harmless, but as Hogan delivers one surprise after another, he’s been making this complex character both a villain and a hero. “A Pleasure and a Calling” brims with wry wit and taut tension, and will make readers think about changing the locks on their doors, just to be cautious.
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