The Ax by Donald E. Westlake

Countless workers are laid off every day. Automation. Computerization. Burke Devore was downsized from his middle-management job at an industrial paper mill sixteen months ago, and the health care and severance have dried up. In the industry for 25 years, it is all he knows.

There are fewer jobs at his level of specialized paper products, and there is always someone closer to the ideal who will win the job he is applying for.

The obvious solution: place his own ad for a fake paper company soliciting résumés. Among the respondents, he finds the six top candidates who are his true competition, who now need to be removed from the list. And he is just the man to do it.

With his father's WWII Luger, he travels over state lines to stalk and kill them off. Sometimes housebreaking, sometimes mistaken for a daughter's creepy boyfriend, and sometimes someone else is blamed. Some he finds he doesn't even need to kill - he's not a monster. It's messy and exhausting work after sixteen years behind a desk, but this is not his only problem—his neglected wife demands marriage counselling, and the police have caught his larcenous son.

This is a Hitchcockian black comedy of manners, full of twists and interruptions to his work.

Burke sees management as a cutthroat industry, and he is naturally doing what is best for his family. This dark and savage satire is an engrossing page-turner - will our anti-hero get the happy ending he deserves?

Donald Westlake is a three-time Edgar Award winner and in 1993, the Mystery Writers of America bestowed their highest honor of Grand Master.

This was filmed by Costa-Gavras as Le Couperet (The Axe) in 2005, and recently to acclaim as the Korean film No Other Choice by director Park Chan-wook, a 2025 nominee for the Best International Feature Film Oscar.

1997 / Paperback / 340 pages

My other reviews for Donald Westlake:

The Hot Rock