Butcher's Boy Books in Order

The Butcher's Boy books follow one of Thomas Perry's most unsettling professionals. The first novel introduces a hitman raised by Eddie Mastrewski, a butcher whose shop gave him a public cover and whose private work taught the boy a second trade. Killing is not a detour for him. It is the education he was given.

In The Butcher's Boy, the job goes wrong after he kills a U.S. senator and a union man, then learns that the people who owe him money would rather have him dead. His answer is direct: he turns on the Mafia network that hired him. At the same time, Justice Department analyst Elizabeth Waring begins to see the shape of one man moving through the violence.

That double view gives the series its tension. Perry lets readers follow the hunted killer as he calculates his next move, then shifts to the people trying to catch or use him. Nobody has the full picture for long. The fun, if that is the right word, comes from watching smart people work with incomplete information.

Michael Schaeffer is not easy company.

The sequels move the story forward by years. Sleeping Dogs finds him after he has built a new life, only to be pulled back into danger when old enemies discover him. The Informant brings him into an uneasy bargain with Waring, now higher in the Organized Crime Division. Eddie's Boy looks backward to the training that made him and forward to another attempt on his life.

These are chase thrillers with a hard edge. Perry is interested in tradecraft, but not the glamorous kind. He writes about route choices, aliases, weapons, hotel rooms, habits, cash, and the simple fact that a person who survives violence has to think before everyone else does.

Read as a set, the books trace the cost of being impossible to catch. Michael can disappear, fight, and outplan younger killers, but each return to the old life proves that no cover identity is permanent. The past keeps sending messengers, and in this series the messengers usually arrive armed.