Back in the day, Little Mo Connor was a force to be reckoned with. A hired gun for Slick Dickey Scalini, he took down the mobster’s opponents without discretion, always with the same, signature kill: three shots in the head, one shot in the heart. He was as cold-blooded a criminal as one could expect from a professional killer, but even so, it’s the kind of job that haunts a man for his entire life. So now, living out his last days in a nursing home, the dementia that has taken control of his brain comes as something of a blessing to Little Mo. Only, he can’t quite remember what it was he wanted to forget--he’s always mixing up the memories from his own life with those from books he’s read and movies he’s seen. A lover of crime novels from the pulp paperback era, Little Mo relishes lurid tales, the more violent, the better. Take, for example, his most recent acquisition: a novel in which he and his trusty .38 snubnose are the stars. It tells the story of an ex-hitman in love with Varla, a geriatric serial killer who convinces him that murdering his grown daughter is the only way to escape the captivity of the nursing home. But as the plot of the novel begins to play out in his waking life, Connor must struggle to separate fact from fiction before they both meet in a deadly conclusion.

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