When he expresses a desire to retire from the life of being an assassin, Nick Majarian, a mobster for whom Billy has worked many times before, offers him one last job–one that pays $500,000 up front, and $1.5 million after it is done.

Billy's target is Joel Allen, another hitman, who was arrested for murdering a man who won a fortune from him in a poker game.

The job requires Billy to go undercover as a resident in the small Southeastern town of Red Bluff, where an office space has been rented out for his use.

Billy's cover story is that he is a writer named David Lockridge, who has been tasked by his agent to go to the office and write each day in an attempt to meet his deadline.

When Nick doesn't pay him the rest of the money he promised after the hit, Billy realizes that his suspicions were correct; he also soon learns that there is a $6 million bounty on his head.

Stephen King first mentioned the novel in an NPR interview in April 2020, where he discussed having to change the story from taking place in 2020 to 2019 due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

[1] In February 2022, Deadline Hollywood reported that the novel would be adapted into a ten-episode limited television series with J. J. Abrams, King, Edward Zwick and Marshall Herskovitz as executive producers.

[6] In a rave review, John Dugdale of The Sunday Times wrote, "Disciplined but adventurous, equally good at action scenes and in-depth psychology, King shows with this novel that, at 73, he's a writer back at the top of his game.

"[7] Neil McRobert of The Guardian called it King's "best book in years," praising his "own brand of muscular, heightened realism."

McRobert wrote that the "odd balance with the sunlit, languorous first half" of the book succeeded "largely because King is so good at character and making us care through incidental details.