Billy Summers

Billy Summers is a 2021 novel by the prolific American novelist Stephen King, known primarily for genre novels including horror stories and thrillers. Billy Summers is a thriller set in 2019, which follows the story of Billy Summers, a 44-year-old veteran of the Iraq war and former Marine sniper. He has since turned his sharpshooting skills to contract killing. However, Billy is a man with a strict moral code, and his hits are always “bad guys.” This novel follows Billy’s last job before retirement. He has a new “clean” identity ready—Dalton Smith, an IT worker—and this final hit promises to be lucrative; Nick Majarian, a Las Vegas middleman with whom Billy has worked before, has offered him $500,000 up front, with $1.5 million to be transferred into an offshore account once the assassination has been carried out. Things become more complicated than Billy anticipated and this “last job” genre piece sprawls into something more complicated and unforeseen.

Billy Summers was first published by Hodder & Stoughton in 2021. This guide refers to the paperback edition published by Hodder & Stoughton in 2022.

Content Warning: This novel contains depictions of sexual violence and rape, allusions to pedophilia and child abuse, graphic violence, and bigoted and racist language, including racial slurs (none of which are directly quoted in this guide).

The target of Billy’s last hit is a man named Joel Allen, another hitman who is currently in jail in Los Angeles. He is facing two sets of charges. The LA charge is for the sexual assault of a “lady writer” and “Me Too chick” whom he mistook for a sex worker and attacked (7). The other charge is for the first-degree murder of a man after a poker game in Red Bluff, a small town in a southern border state. This town "sits east of the Mississippi and just below the Mason-Dixon Line" (9). In Red Bluff, Allen will face the death penalty. When the novel opens, Allen is fighting extradition from LA to Red Bluff. He somehow has an expensive lawyer and is in solitary confinement to protect him from attack. It seems that Allen is attempting to make a plea deal to commute his sentence from death to life in prison. Someone whom Nick doesn’t name wants Allen silenced. Billy is hired to kill Allen—a “bad guy” with a catalogue of crimes to his name—before he can talk.

The stakes are high and so is the payment. Billy will need to live in Red Bluff, embedding himself in the community while awaiting the moment when Allen will be walked up the court steps. The cover story, concocted by Nick and his right-hand man, Giorgio “Georgie Pigs” Piglielli, is that Billy is a writer named David Lockridge working on a major project. He has been leading a life of dissipation, frittering his talent, and not meeting deadlines. To keep him focused on his work, his agent (played by Georgie) has rented him a space to work in an office building opposite the courthouse. Neither Nick nor Georgie realizes that Billy—who has been careful to conceal his intelligence behind the façade of what he calls his “dumb self”—is an avid reader who has always wanted to write a book. This cover will allow him to get to work on the story of his childhood and his life in the Marines. It begins as fiction (written in the voice of his “dumb self”) with all the names changed; as he writes, he drops this pretense, and the book becomes an autobiography written in his own voice. Excerpts of this book are interspersed throughout the novel: It tells the story of how his mother’s abusive boyfriend killed Billy’s younger sister and how he in turn killed this boyfriend in self-defense. He then ended up in foster care as his mother descended into addiction. He describes joining the Marines and becoming a sniper in Iraq.

In Red Bluff, Billy rents a house in a decent but down-at-heel neighborhood called Midwood. He becomes close to his neighbors, who include children with whom he plays Monopoly each weekend. He attends a carnival in a neighboring town and wins a stuffed flamingo for one little girl, Shana, in a shooting game. She draws him a picture—of herself with her treasured flamingo, called Dave after Billy’s alter ego—that he carries with him until near the end of the novel as a good luck charm. Throughout his stay he imagines what these neighbors, whom he comes to care about, will think and feel when his crime and true identity are inevitably revealed.

Billy has been hired for his skills as a marksman—the shot is not an easy one and there will only be one chance—but also for his ability to disappear. He begins planning his escape from day one, but then Nick unexpectedly and uncharacteristically proposes an alternative. Billy has always taken care of his own getaways; he senses a setup and has no intention of going along with Nick’s plan but plays along in his “dumb self” persona. Meanwhile—and without telling Nick or Georgie—Billy begins to inhabit his “clean” Dalton Smith persona in preparation for stepping away from his old life at the end of this job. He rents an apartment in a quiet and shabby part of town, and his longtime broker, Bucky Hanson, sends him the papers for his new identity.

When he receives the news that Allen will soon arrive, Billy makes the final arrangements to take the shot and disappear, including evading Nick’s men by disguising himself as a flamboyant debt collector who works in the same building. On the day in question, Billy’s plan goes without a hitch—he takes the shot, evades Nick’s men, and goes into hiding as Dalton Smith. However, something isn’t right. The final payment never hits his account, and it becomes clear that Billy’s suspicions are correct: He was not supposed to walk away from this last job. Both he and Bucky Hanson go into hiding; Billy remains in Red Bluff as Dalton Smith while Bucky leaves New York for a hideout in Colorado. Not only are the police looking for Billy but there is a $6 million bounty on his head.

While in hiding, Billy encounters Alice Maxwell, a young woman in her early twenties who has been drugged and raped by three men who dump her outside Billy’s apartment on a freezing, rainy night. Fearing that police involvement will result in his discovery, Billy takes Alice in. Despite recognizing him from the TV news, Alice stays with him while she recovers from her injuries. When Billy decides that the time has come to leave Red Bluff and join Bucky in Colorado (en route to confront Nick about his double-cross), Alice insists on going with him and leaving her old life behind.

From Bucky’s hideaway in Sidewinder Colorado, the pair proceed to Nick’s compound in Las Vegas. There Nick kills several of Nick’s men, wounds another, and interrogates Nick about who ordered the hit on Allen and why. He learns that the job was ordered by Roger Klerke, an aging media mogul who had his own son, Patrick, killed by Allen. Patrick had discovered that his father was a pedophile and was using the information to blackmail him for greater control of his media empire. When Allen killed Patrick, he discovered evidence of Roger’s crimes. This was the information he had planned to trade for his own life. Having nearly been exposed by one contract killer, Klerke didn’t want to take the same risk again and ordered Billy killed after the job was done. Billy asks Nick to do the “honorable” thing, call off the bounty hunt, and tell everyone (Klerke included) that Billy is dead. Nick agrees.

Billy and Alice return to Bucky’s hideout, where Billy continues to write. They lure Klerke with pictures of Alice dressed as a younger girl and confront him at his house. Alice is the one to pull the trigger, overcome with rage at his sexual assault of little girls. As they are leaving, Billy is shot by Marge, the mother of one of Nick’s men who experienced severe brain damage when Billy attacked Nick’s estate. Billy and Alice travel back toward Bucky’s hideout in Colorado, but Billy dies during the journey. Alice finishes his book for him and resolves to attend university and become a writer in her own name.