The Butcher'sBoy

Murder has always come easily to the man known only as the butcher's boy. Taken in as a child by an older professional killer whose butcher shop served as his cover, he grew up to become a hired assassin. When a job goes wrong and the people who hired him try to eliminate him, he moves across the country settling scores with the syndicate bosses who betrayed him. Meanwhile Elizabeth Waring, an analyst at the Justice Department, notices a pattern in a string of seemingly unrelated killings and begins to follow it. Told in alternating strands, Thomas Perry's first novel won the 1983 Edgar Award for Best First Novel by an American Author.