A Killing on the Hill
A Killing on the Hill
By: Robert Dugoni
[Fulfilled ‘A book set during Prohibition’ prompt as part of Shelf Reflection’s 2025 Reading Challenge]
[On my list of Most Anticipated Books of 2025]
I have read over ten books by Robert Dugoni. I like his work. And A Killing on the Hill fit the pattern!
This was a fun read because it took place during Prohibition. It had all the theatrical Great Gatsby vibes. The fedoras. The cigars. The speakeasies. The ear trumpets. Everything costs five cents. What an era!
It’s set in Seattle and is inspired by some true events that occurred during that time. Apparently Seattle was basically the Gotham City of the 30s. The corruption ran so deep into the legislative bodies and law-enforcement that not even Al Capone wanted to mess with it.
If Seattle is Gotham City, then our main character, William ‘Shoe’ Shumacher, is a naive and eager Joseph Gordan-Levitt (that’s how I picture him) encountering the city for the first time. He’s a reporter trying to make his way during the Depression and send some money back to his family in Kansas City.
Dugoni begins the book with this quote from Walter Lippmann- “There can be no higher law in journalism than to tell the truth and shame the devil.”
Lippmann wrote a book in 1922 called Public Opinion describing how media and elites shape public opinion. He rightly notes the dangers to democracy we have when the media is biased or doesn’t hold people in power accountable.
This is the dilemma for Shoe in this story. He has the exuberance and tenacity of youth. A drive to find and write the truth. But he’s now been displaced in a corrupt system, feeling the pressure to ‘follow the rules’ if he wants to keep his press badge.
“With each passing day, between Blunt feeding me information he wanted to disseminate to the public and Phish making changes to my articles to add ‘pizzazz,’ I felt like the newspaper boys hawking the sensational simply to sell papers, with little regard for the truth.”
Even though this book takes place almost a hundred years ago, we are still in the same predicament today: can we trust the media to tell the truth, even if it puts people in power in hot water? The trust in the media is at an all time low right now. Some polls show less than 30% of Americans trust the media. I think we need Lippmann back to give these journalists a course in impartiality and truth-telling!
In the book, I love this quote by Shoe’s boss at the paper:
“We have to call them as we see them. A strike’s a strike and a ball’s a ball. The strike zone shouldn’t change depending on who’s at bat, and neither should the article.”
I’m glad that in a story soaked in corruption Dugoni gave us a few stand-up citizens to get behind! There was no Clark Kent/Batman crossover, but our reporter, Shoe, is a heroic and honest young man and the ending was satisfying which definitely doesn’t hurt the reading experience.
So let’s get to the plot of A Killing on the Hill.
Your obvious first question is: what hill is this?
The answer is Profanity Hill. And this is a real hill— First Hill— in Seattle. It’s now called Pill Hill for all the hospitals, but back in the 30s it was the hill all the judges and lawyers had to walk up when the trolley broke down. Have you ever tried to walk up a hill with a briefcase full of cigars and a fedora on your head? I might swear too…
Your next obvious question is: who done got killed?
None other than Frankie Ray. He got popped at a social club. You know the kind.
Shoe gets a tip and gets to break the story in the paper. Did gangster George Miller (Moore if you want to Google the real story), murder Frankie in cold blood or was it self-defense? After all, Frankie used to be a boxer and has a violent streak to him. What’s the motive and what’s at stake?
Side plot: someone owes someone some BIG money.
“Dead or alive, he owes me a dollar fifty.”
Seriously, it was almost comical to imagine this world where five bucks is a week’s pay. A world where you’d do a lot for a dollar. Wild.
About 40% into the book the story moves from in-the-streets-investigation to courtroom trial. Most of the rest of the book is a legal thriller.
I was a little surprised with how straightforward most of the book felt. I kept wondering where the wrench was going to be thrown in. There’s got to be something more at play here.
And there was a baby wrench.
But the trajectory of the story felt more like a straight line than anything else.
I think if it was a more modern day setting that might have bothered me and felt stale, but the setting and atmosphere and the courtroom drama was still engaging to me in this book. I wish I had known from the beginning that there were some historical threads with the story because I think that would have added to the excitement and probably would have sent me on more Google searches as things came up.
[Just do yourself a favor and Google ear trumpet. Whether you read this book or not, you need to know about this.]
I think the strongest part of this book is just the moral dilemmas Shoe faces throughout the book and how he deals with them.
At some point in all the drama it’s realized that there is a large chunk of money hiding somewhere— tax evasion, obvs— and Shoe has to think about what he would do with the money if he finds it.
“Maybe it was time to open my eyes and get what I could, like everyone else.”
Everyone else was getting away with things, why shouldn’t he? After all, it’s the depression. Money is hard to come by. Desperate times and all that.
Eventually, he has an exchange with another character:
“‘I guess we’ll never know.’
’Know what?’
’If we’re as good and moral as we think we are.’”
This was striking to me because I had just been reading a sermon by Mark Bates on Genesis 6 called ‘The Unbounded Nature of Sin.’ The whole sermon is good, but he poses this question- “If you could do something without anyone knowing, without there being any possible consequences, how far would you go?”
Really reflect on your honest answer to that question and you realize that we can’t escape the reality of our sin nature. We have the capacity for a lot of evil and immorality.
Bates says, “it’s all too easy for us to sacrifice our convictions for convenience, our standards for status, our principles for promotion, our absolutes for ambition, our souls for shallow and unsatisfying success.”
When there are no restraints, no consequences for our choices, it’s humbling to think of our own capability for depravity. In God’s mercy he’s put limitations and boundaries in place, governments and such, to help restrain the effects of sin. So maybe we are like Shoe and we can say- ‘I guess we’ll never know if we’re as good and moral as we think we are’ because we haven’t been faced with a big moral dilemma in a corrupt and financially strained society. Or maybe we’re already there. And we’ve already made some choices.
When we read A Killing on a Hill, we love the character of Shoe because we see a shadow of ourselves playing out in a ‘foreign’ world and we want to see what we would do. We like to think we’re all heroes and champions for truth, but when no one is looking who are we?
To get to the point where we recognize the sin in our own hearts and the capacity of evil we have and maybe struggle to restrain is to get to the foot of the cross where we find rescue from that sin and freedom from that sin nature.
Dugoni didn’t have space to share the gospel message in this book, but I can’t read it and not go there!
We all know the story of Noah’s ark. God had Noah build the ark because there was so much wickedness and the intention of man was evil; it required judgment. A holy and loving God must also enact justice against the wicked and rise up in anger against that which corrupts what he loves. Yet Noah believed and found favor in the Lord. God had grace and mercy for Noah.
God sent a rescue for Noah. And he sent a rescue for you. Jesus’s death on the cross— a killing on a different hill— paid the price for all of our sins and his resurrection brings new and eternal life. If you see the wickedness in your heart, know that you can come to Jesus and find rest for your soul, rescue from your sin and future judgment.
A Killing on the Hill showcases corruption and a man who must decide if he will join in and do what everyone else is doing or if he will stand on the principles of truth and honor. It is not a fictional place to stand. You can make a similiar choice.
There may not have been a lot of hope in Seattle in the 1930s, but there is real and eternal hope for you today and may this book inspire you to find it!
Recommendation
I definitely recommend this book.
I suppose if you really hate legal thrillers then this may not be the right choice, but I do think the distinct and theatrical Prohibition/Depression setting and the likeable main character make this book so compelling.
You can read it strictly for the legal thrills, but I also found value in looking deeper at the moral dilemma of the main character and recognizing it as a microcosm of our world today and our choice to ‘do what everyone else is doing’ or stand apart on truth and morality, even if it has social or financial consequences.
Dugoni is a favorite author of mine and I encourage you to also enjoy his books. Even if legal thrillers aren’t your favorite, check out his other books; I think you’ll find something you like!
[Content Advisory: no swearing that I can recall; references to prostitution houses but no real sexual content]
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