Who is Conrad Hirst? is a 2008 Edgar Award nominee in the category for Best Paperback Original.

Conrad Hirst suffered a traumatic loss in Yugoslavia and became a mercenary fighting in the Kosovo conflict. Still broken as a human being, he left the war and was recruited to be a hit man for a German crime boss. He became a cold, dispassionate killer who didn’t care why someone had to die.

On his last job, something happens to Conrad and he decides that he wants out of this life. He decides that the only way out is to kill the only four people who know about him. It seems like a fairly simple plan but it gets complicated almost immediately. Suddenly Conrad is forced to question everything about his existence and he starts on a search for answers.

But it wasn’t the only thing Conrad was rediscovering. He could also feel himself grasping toward a moral framework of sorts. It was still confused, still lost in too many years of not even understanding what it means to end a life. It would take the rest of his life to come to terms with the wrongs he’d done himself, but the wrongs that had been done to him were coming into sharper focus all the time.

I would call this book an espionage thriller, somewhat in the vein of Robert Ludlum’s Jason Bourne; Hirst and Bourne are both assassins trying to solve a mystery. Hirst is a fairly competent killer but, unlike Bourne, has no other skills. In fact, he is pretty much an amateur, untrained and inexperienced in spy craft and survival. I wonder if the author was making a dig at the Bourne films when he wrote:

Conrad was getting frustrated edging around key words like this, and he was getting frustrated with her desire to work it all out. It was a game to her, a complex puzzle, and she’d undoubtedly seen films where people did exactly that …

Who is Conrad Hirst? is a very good read and one I recommend highly. Wignall has done an excellent job in giving us a different treatment of a standard espionage plot. The conclusion to the story is both satisfying and unexpected.