THE RECENT PASSING OF THOMAS PERRY: LOOKING BACK AT THE BUTCHER’S BOY AND FORWARD TO THE TREE OF LIGHT AND FLOWERS (2026)

I was saddened to hear of the passing of Thomas Perry on 15 September 2025. He was one of my favourite American crime writers, and I had been following his books from his debut in 1982, The Butcher’s Boy, through to his latest novel, Pro Bono.

I have greatly enjoyed most of his books, especially the nine in his highly acclaimed series about Jane Whitefield, a Native American woman who has made a career out of helping people disappear. He has also been in very good form over the past few years with some outstanding standalone books, including The Old Man, The Burglar, and Hero, which recently won a Barry Award for Best Action Thriller of 2024.

Thomas Perry’s The Butcher’s Boy won the 1983 Edgar Award for Best First Mystery Novel and remains one of my favourites of the over thirty novels that he has written. I had the pleasure of reviewing The Butcher’s Boy when it was first released in Australia in early 1983.

Set out below is my original review of The Butcher’s Boy which appeared in the Canberra Times on 6 March 1983.

“Thomas Perry’s brilliantly plotted ‘The Butcher’s Boy’ is one of the most impressive debuts in the American crime thriller arena for many a long day.

The butcher’s boy of the title is a very professional and deadly hit man, whose real name is unknown, even to the reader. Much of his success lies in his outward ordinariness, and his ability to blend into any crowd. When, by chance, he is mugged, the resultant bruises make him a marked man, much to the displeasure of his anonymous Las Vegas bosses.

The man who hired him, through numerous middlemen, now wants him dead, and the butcher’s boy must fight back against tremendous odds to find out his hirer’s identity. As well as Las Vegas mobsters, he is also being relentlessly pursued by the FBI and its computers.

Elizabeth Waring, a bright young analyst in the Justice Department, has the job of checking computer printouts to piece together information on professional hit men and mob activities. When she receives her first field assignment to investigate the possible murder of a union official, she finds herself on the bloody trail of the butcher’s boy.

Perry carefully balances his parallel plots, with the FBI and Waring blindly stumbling after the butcher’s boy as he tries to keep one step ahead of the mobsters, while taking personal revenge on those leaders who ordered his extermination.

Perry manages the difficult task of gaining the reader’s sympathy for the amoral hit man by applying the time honoured fictional rule; that if you want readers to become attached to a character, portray in detail that character attempting something difficult, against great odds. He also heightens the tension by alternating sections in which we see the action from the hit man’s viewpoint, with those from Elizabeth Waring’s perspective.

These ploys add enormously to the pace and suspense of the book. The reader often knows things that the butcher’s boy or the police do not, but the final picture is not completed until the last ironic sentence.

The writing and plotting are generally good throughout, faltering only slightly towards the end. The characters are nicely rounded, and not the one-dimensional, cardboard cut-outs which often grace the genre.

‘The Butcher’s Boy’, is a stunning debut, and Mr Perry is definitely one to look out for in the future.”

Perry went on to write another three novels in his popular series about the hired killer known as the Butcher’s Boy, with the fourth, Eddie’s Boy, appearing almost forty years after the The Butcher’s Boy: https://murdermayhemandlongdogs.com/eddies-boy-by-thomas-perry-black-cat-december-2020/

As much as I liked the books about the ‘Butcher’s Boy’, I have tended to enjoy more the books about Jane Whitefield, especially the first two, Vanishing Act and Dance For The Dead, both of which have terrific endings, and a very moving opening chapter in the case of Dance For The Dead. There has been nine books in the series so far, and the good news is that Perry has left us a final book, The Tree Of Light And Flowers (The Mysterious Press), to be published in early 2026:

“A violent car crash brings on the premature birth of the baby that Jane Whitefield and her husband have hoped for, but it also shatters the period of calm in their lives like an earthquake triggering a tectonic shift. Within weeks, Jane’s peaceful time as a new mother in a safe, harmonious home starts to revert to her harrowing previous life. She had spent over a decade rescuing and sheltering people from dangerous foes, taking them to new locations, and teaching them to live under new identities. It was something that she’d hoped to never have to do again. Nearly simultaneously, as though the events were connected, people who are thousands of miles apart in vastly different circumstances start to move. Some of them are in terrible need of help finding a route to safety. Some are dedicated to serving justice. Others are determined to capture the woman who makes people disappear so they can force her to reveal where their potential victims are now. All of these travelers are soon on their way to the old house in western New York. Suddenly the people requiring Jane’s special skills include not only multiple fugitives, but also Jane herself, her husband, and their newborn, as the danger she faces comes from people who know how to find her. She’ll need to use everything she’s ever learned in order to survive.”

It sounds like a great finale to the series and I cannot wait to read it.

I had the pleasure of meeting Thomas Perry at the Bouchercon in Dallas in 2019, and got him to sign one of the books I was missing from my collection, Dead Aim (his books have very difficult to get in Australia over the years).

He was an outstanding author and he will be missed.