Shaker

The tense, darkly funny, unputdownable debut novel from one of the most successful screenwriters of the past twenty years--the tale of a hit man mistaken for a hero whose sudden, unwanted fame makes him a target for the surprising number of people who want him dead.

Roy Cooper, a stoic, unassuming "errand runner" for various New York criminals, arrives in Los Angeles just as a powerful earthquake throws the city into chaos. Still, Roy is able to get his hit job done well. Except for one thing: amid the chaos, he can't find his car. Helplessly lost in North Hollywood, he stumbles upon a jogger being beaten by four gangbangers, and, despite his best efforts, winds up in the middle of the fray. The jogger--a controversial mayoral candidate--is murdered. Roy ends up hospitalized in critical condition and is lionized--mistaken as a hero--when a video of the fight goes viral. Enter Kelly Maguire, an LAPD detective with an anger-management problem and an uneasy feeling about L.A.'s newest hero; Science, the teenage sociopath gangbanger/shooter who needs to keep Roy quiet about what he's seen; Albert, Roy's onetime mentor and one of the scariest, creepiest characters in recent crime fiction; and myriad criminals, politicians, and cops who need Roy to disappear--preferably forever.

SCOTT FRANK was nominated for a Golden Globe Award and Writers Guild Award for Best Adapted Screenplay for Get Shorty. He was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay and won a WGA Award for Out of Sight. His other screenplays include Little Man Tate, Dead Again, Malice, Heaven's Prisoners, Minority Report, The Interpreter, Marley & Me, and The Wolverine. He wrote the screenplay for and made his directorial debut with 2007's The Lookout, which won the Independent Spirit Award for Best First Feature. Most recently, Frank adapted and directed A Walk Among the Tombstones.