Rating: 
Summary: Good twist on some old themes
Review: I really enjoyed this read. The Kennedy/CIA/FBI conspiracy and Cuba/Castro/CIA themes have been done so may times it was hard to pick up this book, however I was really glad I did. With great characters, good plot developement and some great twists in the plot I really didn't know what to expect at the end. I think the mix of very familiar history with fiction worked very well.
This is a great summer read!!!
I just wish the Brits would learn how to spell color and harbor (no "u") and words that end in ize (not ise) :)
Rating: 
Summary: all the hallmarks of a great thriller; except an ending
Review: i'm beginning to think that thrillers like these should carry some kind of disclaimer. WARNING FROM THE LITERARY COUNCIL: do not get too excited. This material contains an ending which may disappoint. Because in almost every other respect, The Shot is not only Kerr's finest, most thrilling, best plotted and fascinatingly peopled work to date - it is a fine and worthy and exciting thriller in its own right. A "new take on the plot to kill JFK", The Shot takes you beneath the surface of the 1960 presidential election and the Cuban Crisis, providing a fascinating look at the mob, FBI, CIA and Cuban-related shenanigans going on at the time. In the middle of it all is professional killer Tom Jefferson (all his other aliases are president names too - nice touch!). Here, Kerr displays what seems to be an almost disturbing understanding of the lives, methods and motivations of professional killers. There are actually three sharply-drawn assassins in this book, each with enough depth, charisma and drawing power to carry a whole thriller on their own. That aspect of The Shot is outstanding - you get the sense that Kerr has either done a great deal of research or has a genius mind for creating believable and ingenious detail. But none of that can make up for the way I feel about The Shot having just finished it. Most of the action takes place between the latter part of 1960 and the beginning of 1961. And as everybody knows, JFK was assassinated in 63. So it's as you draw closer and closer to the last page, and it's still only January 1961, that you begin to get this sinking feeling that this isn't all leading where you hoped it might. And without giving away the end of the book, when everything resolves itself (in an extremely rushed fashion, I might add) the sense of disappointment is enormous. I can't help feeling that if somehow this book had been stolen from me and never recovered, somewhere around page 350, I might have gone on thinking it one of the best thrillers i'd ever read.
Rating:
Summary: Exciting historical fiction
Review: In 1960 Coral Gables, Florida the mob, CIA, and the next president of the United States John Kennedy meet to discuss the removal of Castro from Cuba. The mob wants to regain the lucrative businesses they lost when Communism took over the island. The CIA wants to eradicate Communism from the hemisphere. The future President sees the expulsion of Castro as a means of paying back the mob for stealing the White House for him. Everyone agrees that hit man Tom Jefferson has the right stuff to do the job and take the fall. However, Tom listens to a tape that the mob made of JFK and Marilyn Monroe sharing a romantic rendezvous, but the only problem is the woman with Kennedy is Tom's wife Mary who soon turns up dead. Tom vanishes into the night with mob chief Giancana's money and a revised plan. He begins stalking Kennedy not Castro. THE SHOT is an exciting historical fiction that blends real events and sixties' rumors into a taut political thriller. The story line is filled with action although non-baby boomers may tire of the era's tidbits that flood the plot and anchor it to the decade. With real persona and the deadly Tom, Philip Kerr shows why his previous novels like ESAU and A FIVE-YEAR PLAN are so popular by reinventing the Kennedy assassination with a new intriguing conspiracy theory.
Rating:
Summary: Another great book from Philip Kerr!
Review: It was my second Philip Kerr's book, and it was so good as the first one. He style, remember a mix of Michael Chrichton, with James Elroy. The story is great. Brings a new view, about Jonh Kennedy's death. This is a fantastic book. Every thriller's fan should read it.
Rating:
Summary: Felt Rather Dashed Off
Review: Kerr's WWII-era Berlin Trilogy (March Violets, The Pale Criminal, A German Requiem) is some of my favourite historical fiction, so I figured I'd give one of his more recent thrillers a chance. This one is set in 1960, mainly in Havana, Miami, New York, with side trips to Vegas and Chicago and takes place over the course of the Nixon/Kennedy election and the buildup to JFK's inauguration. Kerr weaves a fairly elaborate plot around the JFK assassination conspiracy mythos, involving a top assassin, the mob, Cuban intelligence, crooked CIA and FBI agents running amok, inept Secret Service, and a bevy of sexpots, building up to an attempt to kill Kennedy prior to the inauguration. There are two major, major reversals (ie. unexpected plot twists), and many reviewers are inexplicably revealing the first of these in their summaries. I will not, but suffice to say, it's these two reversals that keep the pages turning. Of course, we all know what happened in Dallas, several years later, and Kerr manages to produce an ending to explain that as well. Some reviewers have complained that since we know the assassination doesn't take place, there's no suspense. Personally, I found that creating and building the suspense in the face of such knowledge is Kerr's most impressive achievement in this case. Much like Frederick Forsyth's "The Day of the Jackal," the reader is drawn into the world and methodology of the killer and those tracking him. Unfortunately, plot seems to be occurring at the expense of character. There's no one to really root for or care about, which is fine in a lot fiction, but doesn't usually work so well in thrillers. Not only is there no one to care about, there's scant characterization to begin with, the male characters all have the same tired tough-guy patter, and the women are exclusively characterized as sex objects (and not amazingly banal ones at that). Kerr's attention to cultural icons and detail, which was a wonderful element in his Berlin Noir trilogy, proves to be far less interesting when applied to America in the 1960s (perhaps because it is so much more familiar). When you combine these weaknesses with several linguistic anachronisms, and a total absence of the wonderful turns of phrase in his earlier work, you get the feeling this was a rather dashed off bit of fluff for Kerr.
Rating: 
Summary: How John junior saved the life of JFK
Review: Monday, November 22nd, 1999, marked the thirty-sixth anniversary of the death of John F. Kennedy. Had he lived he would have been eighty-three this year - a year older than his father Joe was when he died, in 1969. Last year, November 22nd - a date that sticks in most people's minds - passed without mention in the media of the assassination - overshadowed as it was by the recent death, in July, of Jack Kennedy's son, John junior. John Junior was just three when his father was shot. Nothing else he did in his short life approached the force of the salute he made at his father's funeral - a television moment that everyone who saw it will always remember. And yet, in a list compiled by London's Observer newspaper in September 1999, it was the Kennedy assassination which most people chose as one of their 'top ten' unforgettable television moments. This, despite the fact that the Zapruder film (for which the Zapruder family was finally paid, last year - they received $16 million) was not actually seen on any television screen, in the USA or the UK, until 1975. Although I was only seven at the time, my own memory of that fateful Friday night is still quite clear, and amusingly mundane: the BBC had blacked out The Harry Worth Show as a mark of respect, a course of action that seemed quite out of proportion to something that had happened in a place as far away as Dallas, Texas, and to someone I had never even heard of. As I grew older, however, I started to become fascinated with the assassination and, like many people, paid attention to most of the conspiracy theories about what really happened (although some of these, we now know, thanks to the recently published Mitrokhin Archive, were created by the Soviet KGB's Disinformation Department). Being a novelist I started to wonder how, despite the many hundreds of books that have been written about the assassination, I might write something about it myself. Something new. The challenge proved irresistible and finally I worked out a way to do it. I would write a novel, called The Shot, about a fictional attempt to kill JFK at some time before November 22nd 1963. There would be no Lee Harvey Oswald, no Jack Ruby, no Dallas, not even a grassy knoll - just a lone assassin, with a nod to Fredderick Forsyth's Jackal, bent on killing Kennedy in the earliest days of his presidency. You can imagine my surprise therefore, when, in the course of my meticulous research, I discovered that there had been a real attempt to kill John F. Kennedy as early as December 1960; and that but for John junior, JFK would have been assassinated before he was even inaugurated. Even well-informed Americans much older than myself did not seem to know about this, and I resolved to build the real assassination attempt into my own novel. This is the story of the first real attempt to kill President-elect John F.Kennedy. JFK won the 1960 election defeating Richard Nixon by the slenderest of majorities. Later on, Kennedy told his friend, the journalist Ben Bradlee, that the election had cost his hugely rich father, Joe, $13 million - about $100 million in today's money. Joe Kennedy is best remembered as being US Ambassador to Britain at the beginning of the Second World War. What is perhaps less well known is that Joe, a former bootlegger, was closely connected to the world of organised crime. Cardinal Francis Spellman of New York once described Joe as 'a truly evil man'. Joe would like to have been President himself. But he had too many skeletons in his closet. And there were too many others who shared Spellman's low opinion of him. One such man was Richard P. Pavlick, a seventy-three year old retired postal worker from Belmont, New Hampshire. Considered by his neighbours to be somewhat vocal at town meetings and something of a local eccentric, Pavlick was also a prolific writer of letters to the newspapers; and his favourite subject was that Joe Kennedy was trying to buy the presidency for his son. What was less well known about Pavlick was that he had a history of psychiatric problems and had been treated at a New Hampshire mental hospital. There was nothing Pavlick could do to prevent Kennedy being elected; but he decided he could stop him from ever being inaugurated as America's thirty-fifth President. It is a peculiarity of American politics that an incumbent President does not assume the office, nor occupy the White House, until he has been inaugurated, some ten weeks later. Kennedy had won the election on November 9th 1960; but he would not be in safe in the White House until after January 20th 1961. The young President-elect spent the intervening period at various Kennedy family homes in New York, Georgetown, Hyannis Port, and Palm Beach in Florida putting together his cabinet. In planning The Shot I visited all of these properties, equipped with a rifle scope, considering their fictional feasibility as potential assassination sites, in the knowledge that so had Richard Pavlick. Finally he was to decide that Palm Beach provided him with the best opportunity, not least because Kennedy was there so much. Kennedy worshipped the sun, not to mention the local ladies, who dubbed him 'Mattress Jack' for obvious reasons. So JFK enjoyed the last weeks of 1960 at 1095 North Ocean Boulevard in Palm Beach, sunning himself, swimming, playing golf, offering people jobs in his administration, and sneaking out of the house under Jackie's nose to get laid in a private suite at The Breakers Hotel nearby. The house had been called La Guerida when Joe Kennedy had bought it for $100,000 back in the early 1930s. From the road there is very little to see - just an archway with a heavy oak door in a big white wall and, beyond, the glimpse of a white stucco corner and a red tile roof among a whole plantation of wind-bent palm trees. The house looks as private as a camera-shy clam. From the ocean-side it's a different story and the house - swiftly dubbed the winter White House - can be seen for what it is. That is if the local Coastguards let you linger long enough. Even today they are a constant security feature around the property. The hundred feet long, two-storey house sits atop a private dock amidst lush vegetation that shows a contempt for the cost of gardeners. The Kennedy place is an impressive-looking house although by the brash standard of some of the houses in the area it is actually a tad Boston conservative. At sometime toward the end of November, Richard Pavlick sold or gave away all of his property and set out, in his station wagon, to kill the forty-three year old President-elect. And somewhere along the fifteen hundred mile journey, he purchased detonators, blasting caps, seven sticks of dynamite and four large cans of gasoline. In West Palm Beach, the cheaper part of town, he checked into a local motel, which, ironically, was very close to where Kennedy's own secret service detail was lodged. Nobody noticed him rigging up a car bomb in the motel car-park. And on December 11th he drove to the house on North Ocean Boulevard. His plan was a simple one: to wait for Kennedy to come out of the house, and then to crash into the presidential limousine before detonating the car bomb, killing both Kennedy and himself. But Richard Pavlick had not reckoned on John junior. Like Tony Blair, JFK never missed a photo-opportunity, and with dozens of news reporters grouped on the road out front, there were plenty of these to be had. Every time Kennedy came out of the house he was accompanied by Jackie and their baby boy, born as recently as November 26th. Pavlick hated JFK; but he had nothing against Jackie and her baby John junior. The hugely popular Jackie was the Princess Diana of her day; and the new baby was the apple of everyone's eye. So Pavlick delayed, awaiting another opportunity; and another. He went back to North Ocean Boulevard several times; and in all he was parked in the road for five days. This says all you need to know about the Secret Service detail that was supposed to be protecting JFK. It was December 15th before Pavlick was finally arrested, not by a Secret Service agent, but by a humble Palm Beach patrolman, for committing a minor traffic violation. At which point the dynamite was found. Pavlick was charged with planning to assassinate the President-elect, on December 16th 1960. At the time, the Secret Service denied Pavlick had ever got close to Kennedy and it would be the week after the inauguration before the 'retiring' chief of the service, one U.E.Baughman, admitted to Look magazine just how close a call it had really been. Meanwhile, on January 27th, Federal Judge Emmett C.Choate ordered Pavlick committed to the United States Public Health Service's mental hospital at Springfield, Minnesota. It will never be known just how many times JFK came close to being blown up before he was even inaugurated as President of the United States, but it is certain that his life was saved by his own baby son, John junior.
Rating:
Summary: What a juicy, fun story!
Review: Never having read a Philip Kerr novel, I was not expecting
anything. O.K., it's not Proust, but it kept me entertained to
the very last drop. I must say, I anticipated the last line of
the book, but so what? I thought the characters were
fantastic. It reminded me a little of Prizzi's Honor - not quite
as literary a tour de force, but amusing gangsters being
themselves. I was very disappointed - saddened - by the death of Nimmo. He was such a neat character. I kept half-expecting him to turn up at the end alive...hidden, perhaps, by the FBI, as protection...oh, well. ... Yes, the women were stereotyped...I thnk the book is all about guys-and-gangsters; it's a real "guy thing" and though
I am a feminist it didn't bother me ... I thought that was
unnecessary, although there were plenty of pejorative expressions for Jews, the Irish, Italians, Germans and just about every other ethnic group on the planet... Anyway, I loved the story. ...the characters were wonderfully real...the
scene in which Nimmo tucks into a linguine prima vera over a gruesome autopsy report, while the squeamish gangster Roselli looks on with disgust, is priceless. As for the wise cracks - they made the book a real pleasure;
it was a trip down memory lane for some of us who were
around during the early sixties. In this book Kerr is like a
stand-up New York-Miami comedian, constantly flipping terse references to celebrities of the Kennedy years. And Tom Jefferson is one sexy killer. I think women would like this book, too. I know I did.
Rating: 
Summary: Typical Philip Kerr
Review: Philip Kerr has tackled disparate subjects during his writing career, each book hallmarked by meticulous research, and an evocative recreation of the milieu under consideration. "The Shot" carries on the tradition, the locations this time being the USA and Cuba during the Kennedy Presidency. Any description of plot would subtract from the enjoyment of this thriller, but suffice it to say that Kerr has taken an oft commented upon subject, and added quite an original twist to its ending.
Rating:
Summary: Not real thrilling
Review: Philip Kerr's latest involves Americas deadliest assassin Tom Jefferson. Jefferson is hired by the mob to kill Castro. After accepting money for the job, he happens across a secret recording of JFK having a go at his wife (who happens to work on JFK's campaign). This causes Jefferson to change targets. Due to his failure to follow through with the Castro assassination, the Mob now targets him. The novel takes place in 1960 and '61 and has been researched real well. From the songs that were popular to the talk shows and movies (Psycho). The novel lacks suspense. We know no assassination takes place in '60 or '61. It also lacks a protagonist to cheer for. Most characters in the novel are crooked and corrupt. The reading was dry. Philip Kerr's previous novels 'Esau' and 'A five year plan' were, in my opinion, much better books. As a thriller writer, I feel Philip Kerr has slipped a notch with this latest effort. Recommendation...Library
Rating: 
Summary: Great Concept! Poor Novel.
Review: The concept of The Shot is brilliant - fictional hitman Tom Jefferson shuffling behind the scenes of actual history - sort of like the underworld's own Forrest Gump. This turned out to be a grand example of "don't judge a book by its cover", because like a box of chocolates... well, The Shot was not what I expected. There are flashes of great literary candy here, but all too often the effort feels mediocre. Many of the characters, especially the faceless mob men, were so flat they could have been completely interchangeable. Even the anti-hero seemed limp in every way but his actions. One could honestly feel as though they don't know anything about Jefferson, and maybe that's the point, but in actuallity it left this reader not caring about him, his deeds, or his fate. Most of Jefferson's motivation is still a mystery to me. It seemed too simplistic to say he merely did it ONLY for the money. The Shot will initially appeal to many a conspiracy theorist, but even that angle seemed somewhat weak. The Kennedy assassination is almost an afterthought in the wake of the many behind-the-scenes meetings between the movers and shakers of "organized" crime.
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