When you next sit down at your local coffee shop, look around you: there may just be a professional hitman sitting at the next table. As author Mark Shaw reveals in this highly original and informative book, the ‘upper world’ sails perilously close to the underworld.

Hitmen for Hire takes the reader on a journey like no other, navigating a world of hammermen (hitmen), informers, rogue policemen, taxi bosses, gang leaders and crooked businessmen. The book examines a system in which contract killings have become the norm, looking at who arranges hits, where to find a hitman, and even what it is like to be a hitman – or woman. Since 1994, South Africa has witnessed some spectacular underworld killings associated with various industries and sectors. Drawing on over a thousand cases, from 2000 to 2016, Shaw reveals how these murders have an outsized impact on the evolution of both legal and illegal economic activity.

‘Gripping, a must-read. This work is of immense value.’
– Vusi Pikoli, former head of the National Prosecuting Authority

‘This is an extraordinary, enthralling read. With his unique insight,
Mark Shaw has thrown a spotlight onto the underworld, exposing
the commercialisation of murder in South Africa. I have
interviewed a fair number of hitmen as a journalist, but this book
still shocked me from cover to cover.’
– Mandy Weiner, author of Killing Kebble

‘Mark Shaw takes a subject usually confined to the pages of pulp
fiction and turns it into the stuff of serious analysis on the place
that assassinations occupy in South Africa’s political, economic
and social life.’ – Jonny Steinberg, author of A Man of Good Hope