“Hitmen don’t worry about what their underwear’s like, but then proper hitmen don’t poo in their pants.”

When Tom White’s dead-end life is blighted by his neighbour’s parties Tom’s aversion to face to face confrontation leads him to an unusual action: he kills the noise pollutant.

Unknown to Tom, the neighbour was a target for Stan Costanza, head of a powerful criminal enterprise. Costanza’s heavies are more adept than the police at tracking Tom down and in a farcically comic meeting become convinced that Tom is a skilled lone assassin “one of them ones with the eastern mystical influences”. They offer him another hit and Tom, too scared and perhaps too flattered to decline, takes the job, and the next.

Colin, Tom’s best friend, shares Tom’s macabre moral compass and rides shotgun on his assignments, leading to a series of comedy set-pieces but inevitably into darker waters as the reality of their actions takes hold, causing the pair to fall out.

Tom catches the interest of Laura, the barmaid in his local pub, and becomes torn between his desire for the long-term object of his affections and the need to keep his nefarious activities from her.

When the impossibly beautiful Stephanie arrives, Tom assumes she is a high-ranking member of Costanza’s operation and takes the contracts she assigns. Stephanie doesn’t tell him that her father was murdered by Stan Costanza in a criminal coup d’etat. Stephanie is orchestrating a turf-war between two rival gangs using Tom, along with some of Costanza’s own people, as a key piece in her game to avenge her father’s death and regain her birthright.

By the time he realises that he is an unwitting double agent, Tom is being pursued by two police forces and both gangs. As the net closes around him he has no option but to ‘fess up to Laura, make peace with Colin and leave his fate in the hands of Stephanie.

Costanza meets his arch-rival, Joe Barrett, for a sit-down to discusstheir mutual problem - namely Tom White - but this is actually Stephanie’s final push. She shows her cards to the hapless crime-lords, including the fact that she has turned most of their own men against them. In a final showdown, Stephanie kills both men and takes what is rightfully hers.

But what of Tom? Wanted for murder he badly needs a fresh start. Stephanie uses her valuable connections to set up a new life for him, Laura and Colin under the cloak of the witness protection program in the USA. They have a new home, new names and Tom has a new job, one that makes good use of his talents and protects his anonymity: an executioner for the state of Texas.

Accidental Hitman is a thriller but features large doses of comedy in the rapport between the characters, the first-person narrator’s musings on modern life and the farcical situations Tom and Colin bumble into as they carry out their murders-to-order.

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