Death Is a Business: A Review of Murder for Hire by Jack Steen

The Asylum Confession Files #8 | Horror, Thriller, Mystery, and Crime | 246 pages | First published February 9, 2024
Rating: ★★★★☆

Jack Steen returns to the death ward in Murder for Hire, the eighth installment in The Asylum Confession Files. This time, the four confessions revolve around killers whose violence is connected to payment, employment, or the idea of murder as a service.

The series retains its established premise: violent criminals arrive on Jack Steen’s ward alive, reveal the stories they have never told anyone else, and eventually leave dead. Steen is the asylum’s night nurse and often the last person his patients see. To them, he is the Angel of Death. To him, they are murderers, predators, and manipulators approaching their final moments.

Steen offers to make death less painful, but his mercy comes with a condition. He wants the complete confession—not the official version given to investigators or courts, but the hidden story beneath it. Whether these patients actually tell him the truth remains uncertain.

That uncertainty is once again the series’ most compelling feature. A dying killer may have little left to lose, but that does not mean the killer has stopped lying.

A Profession Built on Death

The murder-for-hire theme gives this installment a distinct identity. Previous confessions in the series have explored different forms of serial violence, but paid killing introduces an especially disturbing question: what happens when murder becomes work?

A killer acting from personal rage, obsession, or revenge is frightening. A killer who treats death as a transaction can be even more unsettling. The victim may be a stranger. The killer may feel no emotional connection to the target. Violence becomes a task carried out for money, loyalty, opportunity, or professional satisfaction.

This transactional element also mirrors Steen’s arrangement with his patients. The killers once exchanged death for compensation; now, on the ward, they exchange their stories for relief from pain. Both arrangements involve bargaining over human suffering.

The parallel does not make Steen equivalent to his patients, but it adds moral tension. He offers comfort, yet he also demands something valuable in return. The patients need him physically, while Steen needs—or perhaps craves—the truth they possess.

Murder for Hire therefore operates through two kinds of transaction. The first led to victims being killed. The second produces the confessions readers are invited to hear.

Four Killers, Four Hunting Grounds

The book contains four deathbed confessions featuring Ernest, Tommy, Shannon, and Jimmy Dale. Each patient represents a different style of predatory violence.

Ernest is described simply as a cold-blooded killer. Tommy brings danger to the sea. Shannon is associated with the colors black, red, and green through the image of a widow. Jimmy Dale hunts human beings as though they were animals.

These concepts give the collection variety while preserving its central theme. Murder for hire is not presented as a single profession practiced in one predictable way. Instead, it becomes a broad framework encompassing different environments, methods, personalities, and motivations.

Patient Ernest: A Killer Without Illusions

Ernest receives the most direct introduction: he is a cold-blooded killer, period. There is no elaborate label, unusual setting, or playful qualification. The bluntness suggests that Ernest requires no decorative mythology. Killing is enough to define him.

That simplicity can be more threatening than a complicated persona. Some murderers invent philosophies to justify what they do. Others portray themselves as victims, vigilantes, artists, or misunderstood outsiders. Ernest’s description implies a man who may not need such excuses.

Within a murder-for-hire collection, a purely cold-blooded killer represents the terrifying endpoint of professional detachment. If killing is only a job, emotional distance becomes an advantage. Remorse interferes with efficiency, while empathy creates hesitation.

Ernest’s confession naturally raises questions about motive and identity. Did he kill only for payment, or did money provide permission to do something he already wanted to do? Was he loyal to his employers, or only to himself? Did he follow rules, or did the idea of professionalism merely disguise cruelty?

His direct characterization also creates an interesting challenge for Steen. Manipulators are not always theatrical. A patient can deceive through apparent simplicity, offering a clean and convincing narrative that conceals deeper motives. Ernest may seem honest precisely because he does not decorate his identity.

The question is whether his bluntness represents truth or another carefully chosen performance.

Patient Tommy: Death at Sea

Tommy is described as the killer in the sea no one would want to meet. His confession moves the threat away from the institutional confines of the asylum and into an environment defined by isolation, depth, and uncertainty.

The sea is an effective setting for murder because it naturally conceals evidence. Its size makes witnesses unlikely, while currents, distance, and weather can erase traces of violence. A disappearance at sea may be interpreted as an accident long before anyone considers murder.

Isolation also changes the balance between killer and victim. On land, a target may run toward other people, seek shelter, or contact authorities. At sea, escape can be physically impossible. The killer may control the vessel, the route, the equipment, and the victim’s chances of survival.

Tommy’s characterization suggests a predator adapted to that environment. Whether he works aboard boats, attacks people in the water, or uses the sea to conceal his crimes, his territory gives him a practical advantage. It also lends his confession an atmosphere different from the urban settings commonly associated with contract killers.

His story may blur the line between professional murder and maritime nightmare. The sea can become both weapon and accomplice, allowing Tommy to make killings appear accidental or leave victims where recovery is unlikely.

Like the other patients, Tommy controls how Steen learns about his crimes. A story involving the sea may be particularly difficult to verify because the evidence could be inaccessible or permanently lost. Steen must decide whether Tommy is finally revealing what happened or using an unknowable environment to exaggerate his reputation.

Patient Shannon: The Multicolored Widow

Shannon is called a black, red, and green widow, expanding the familiar image of the “black widow” killer through a striking combination of colors.

The black widow archetype usually refers to a woman who kills intimate partners, often for financial gain. It combines domestic trust with predation: the victim does not encounter a stranger in a dark alley but danger within a close relationship.

The addition of red and green complicates that image. Red naturally suggests blood, passion, anger, or danger. Green may evoke money, greed, envy, poison, or even a misleading appearance of life and renewal. Black remains associated with death, mourning, and concealment.

Together, the three colors suggest that Shannon’s motives and methods may extend beyond the conventional widow narrative. Love, money, jealousy, and death may overlap in her confession. The description also implies that she cannot be reduced to one familiar category.

Shannon’s place in a murder-for-hire collection is especially intriguing. A widow who kills for personal profit differs from an assassin paid by an outside employer. Her relationships themselves may be the contracts, with marriage or intimacy creating access to victims and their assets.

Alternatively, she may occupy multiple roles: partner, beneficiary, manipulator, and hired killer. The exact connection between her widow identity and paid murder becomes part of the mystery.

Her confession may also challenge assumptions about emotional involvement. A contract killer is often imagined as detached from the target, while a widow killer is personally connected to the victim. Shannon potentially combines financial calculation with intimacy, making trust another weapon.

Patient Jimmy Dale: Hunting Human Prey

Jimmy Dale has a taste for hunting two-legged prey. His characterization transforms murder into sport, positioning human beings as targets to be tracked and killed.

The hunting motif carries several disturbing implications. A hunter studies behavior, chooses terrain, prepares equipment, and waits for the right moment. When those skills are directed at people, murder becomes a contest in which only the killer understands the rules.

Jimmy Dale may not view his victims as individuals. Describing them as prey creates emotional distance and places him above them in an imagined hierarchy. He becomes the hunter; they become animals whose fear and attempts to escape are part of the experience.

Within the murder-for-hire theme, his interest in hunting raises a crucial question: is money truly his motive, or merely an excuse to pursue people? A professional killer might accept payment because it provides targets, resources, and legitimacy within a criminal system. The compensation matters, but the hunt itself may be the real reward.

That distinction makes Jimmy Dale potentially one of the collection’s most unsettling patients. Someone who kills reluctantly for money remains dangerous, but someone who would hunt people regardless of payment is something else entirely.

His confession may also become a final hunt conducted through language. Steen wants the truth, but Jimmy Dale can lead him through false trails, partial disclosures, and psychological traps. Even while dying, the hunter may still be looking for prey.

Murder as Transaction

The theme of murder for hire changes the moral structure of each crime. At least two people may share responsibility: the person who performs the killing and the person who wants it done.

A hired killer may pull the trigger, administer the poison, arrange the accident, or dispose of the body. Yet someone else may have selected the victim and provided the incentive. This creates layers of guilt that a confession can expose—or deliberately conceal.

Steen’s patients might reveal who hired them, but they could also protect former clients. They might falsely accuse enemies, inflate the scale of their work, or claim that personal murders were paid assignments. A supposed contract can become a convenient way to shift responsibility.

Instead of saying, “I wanted this person dead,” a killer can say, “It was only business.” That phrase creates emotional distance without reducing culpability. In some ways, it makes the crime colder. The victim’s life has been assigned a price, and the killer has agreed to the valuation.

The employer may use similar logic. Rather than committing murder personally, the client treats the killer as a tool and imagines that distance reduces responsibility. The transaction allows everyone involved to divide guilt while the victim suffers the full consequence.

This makes the theme well suited to the series’ confessional format. Steen is not merely asking how someone died. He is asking who ordered the death, why the patient accepted the job, and what part of the official story remains hidden.

Confession as the Final Contract

Every installment in the series involves a bargain, but Murder for Hire makes that structure particularly visible.

Steen offers relief from suffering. In return, the patient provides information. The object being exchanged is no longer a victim’s life but the truth about that life. Still, both parties are negotiating in the presence of death.

This creates an uncomfortable power struggle. Steen controls medication, care, and physical comfort. The patients control their secrets. Neither can obtain what they want without the cooperation of the other.

The patients may attempt to renegotiate by withholding names, changing details, or forcing Steen to hear increasingly disturbing material. They know he wants the story no one else has heard. That desire gives them influence even when they are physically helpless.

Steen, meanwhile, must determine how far he will go to secure a confession. His role as a nurse suggests compassion, but his reputation as the Angel of Death introduces ambiguity. Is he collecting these accounts to expose the truth, to understand evil, or to satisfy a darker fascination?

The murder-for-hire theme intensifies those questions because Steen’s own system resembles a service with a price. His intentions may be more merciful, but his patients understand transactions. They know how to exploit someone who wants something from them.

The Problem of the Professional Killer

Popular fiction often presents hired killers as disciplined professionals with codes, rules, and specialized abilities. Such characters can be portrayed as stylish, controlled, or even admirable despite their work.

Murder for Hire appears to place this fantasy in the uglier environment of the death ward. Whatever status these patients once possessed, they end up dying in an asylum under Steen’s supervision. The glamorous image of the assassin gives way to physical decline, confinement, and confession.

The four patients also seem less like interchangeable professionals than killers with personal appetites. Ernest’s coldness, Tommy’s relationship with the sea, Shannon’s widow imagery, and Jimmy Dale’s hunting fixation all suggest that personality cannot be separated from occupation.

This distinction matters. If a person repeatedly accepts money to kill, the work eventually becomes part of identity. Professional detachment may be a performance used to avoid confronting desire, cruelty, or guilt.

The confessions offer an opportunity to strip away that performance. Yet because the patients remain manipulators, the supposedly honest deathbed account may become another version of the professional persona.

A killer can claim efficiency to hide pleasure. A predator can claim necessity to disguise obsession. A murderer can describe victims as assignments because recognizing them as people would make the truth harder to bear.

Four Different Environments of Fear

One of the book’s apparent strengths is the environmental variety offered by its patients.

Ernest represents stripped-down, direct menace. Tommy brings violence into the isolation of the sea. Shannon transforms intimacy and domestic trust into danger. Jimmy Dale turns wilderness and hunting grounds into spaces of human predation.

This variation helps prevent the shared theme from becoming repetitive. Murder for hire could easily produce four similar accounts involving anonymous assassins and criminal employers. Instead, the featured patients suggest different subgenres:

• Ernest embodies hard-edged criminal horror.
• Tommy introduces maritime suspense.
• Shannon brings domestic and psychological danger.
• Jimmy Dale evokes survival horror and human hunting.

The asylum framework binds these stories together. No matter where the original crimes occurred, each narrative ends in the same place: Steen’s ward, where the killer no longer controls the physical environment but may still control the account.

Reliability and Manipulation

The series repeatedly warns that its patients are skilled manipulators. That warning is especially important when dealing with hired killers because their work may already depend on deception.

A contract killer must conceal identity, misdirect investigators, create false timelines, and sometimes make murder resemble accident or suicide. Lying is not merely a personality trait; it may be an occupational skill.

The patients also have several reasons to distort their confessions:

• They may want to protect whoever hired them.
• They may falsely identify a client out of revenge.
• They may claim additional murders to increase their notoriety.
• They may minimize the number of victims.
• They may portray personal killings as professional assignments.
• They may invent rules or moral limits they never followed.
• They may manipulate Steen into delivering a message after their deaths.

A deathbed confession can therefore create more uncertainty rather than resolving it. Steen receives information that may be impossible to verify before the patient dies. If he believes the wrong details, the killer’s final lie could survive indefinitely.

The reader faces the same problem. These stories promise access to hidden truth, but every revelation passes through someone with experience in concealment. The pleasure of the book comes partly from deciding what, if anything, should be believed.

Tone and Narrative Style

Like the preceding installments, Murder for Hire is built around a direct, provocative style. The character descriptions are concise and sensational, presenting each patient through a vivid hook.

The book belongs to a pulpy form of horror-thriller fiction rather than an understated procedural tradition. Its appeal lies in extreme personalities, concealed crimes, ominous settings, and dramatic revelations.

At 246 pages, the collection gives its four confessions enough room to develop while maintaining a relatively brisk structure. The limited number of patients allows each one to receive more attention than would be possible in a collection packed with shorter accounts.

The format is also well suited to readers who enjoy episodic storytelling. Each confession offers a new killer and setting, while Steen’s presence provides continuity.

Readers seeking meticulous police work or restrained psychological realism may find the approach heightened. The patients are designed around memorable concepts, and their stories embrace the darker, more theatrical possibilities of criminal horror.

Ethical Ambiguity and the Angel of Death

Steen remains the narrative and moral center of the series, but he is not a conventional hero. He cares for dying patients who have committed terrible crimes, yet his compassion is tied to his demand for disclosure.

His role creates several unresolved tensions. A nurse should relieve suffering, but Steen makes relief conditional. A listener might preserve confidentiality, but the purpose of these confessions is to expose hidden stories. A caregiver should maintain emotional boundaries, yet Steen repeatedly invites manipulative killers into his mind.

His nickname captures this ambiguity. An Angel of Death can represent mercy, judgment, or lethal power. The patients may see Steen as someone who eases their passage, but they may also fear what he is willing to do.

The killers in this installment understand the relationship between death and compensation better than most. They may interpret Steen’s bargain through their own values, viewing his mercy as a service and confession as payment.

That interpretation risks pulling Steen into their moral world. Even if his intentions differ from theirs, the structure of negotiation may feel familiar to people who spent their lives assigning prices to death.

Content Considerations

The book contains profanity and disturbing subject matter involving serial killers, mass murderers, and paid violence. Readers should expect descriptions or discussions of murder, predation, fear, and criminal manipulation.

The featured concepts may also involve:

• Human hunting
• Death at sea
• Intimate or domestic betrayal
• Financially motivated murder
• Psychological cruelty
• Violence against vulnerable or isolated victims
• Discussions of dying and end-of-life suffering

The asylum setting uses the sensational language and conventions of institutional horror. Readers looking for a sensitive or realistic portrayal of psychiatric care may find that aspect uncomfortable.

This is not a traditional puzzle mystery or a restrained crime drama. Its premise deliberately centers on extreme offenders giving graphic or disturbing final accounts.

What the Book Does Well

The strongest element of Murder for Hire is the fit between its theme and the series’ established structure. Paid killers understand bargaining, secrecy, compartmentalization, and emotional distance. Placing them opposite Steen creates a natural contest over the value of truth.

The four patients also appear distinct from one another. Their settings and identities provide variety without weakening the central idea. The sea, intimate relationships, hunting grounds, and cold professional violence all offer different expressions of predation.

The anthology format supports suspense because each confession can reveal not only what the killer did but who else may have been responsible. Murder for hire expands the mystery beyond the patient. Every death potentially points toward an unseen employer.

Finally, the book preserves the series’ central uncertainty. Steen wants the real story, but wanting the truth does not guarantee that he receives it. These patients have built their identities around secrecy and deception. Their final confession may be honest—or their final paid performance.

Where It May Divide Readers

The recurring death-ward formula may feel familiar to readers who have followed all seven previous installments. The patients change, but the pattern remains consistent: arrival, negotiation, confession, and death.

The bold character concepts may also seem exaggerated to readers seeking realism. A sea-based killer, a multicolored widow, and a hunter of humans belong to a heightened fictional world where memorable imagery takes priority over ordinary criminal behavior.

Some readers may be uncomfortable with the use of serial murder as entertainment, especially when the stories employ dark humor or sensational hooks. Others will see that excess as essential to the series’ identity.

The unreliable-narrator structure can also be frustrating for anyone who prefers definite solutions. A confession that cannot be verified may leave questions unresolved, and the patient’s death can make certainty impossible.

Who Should Read It?

Murder for Hire is likely to appeal to:

• Readers already following The Asylum Confession Files
• Fans of serial-killer horror and crime thrillers
• Readers interested in assassins and contract killings
• Those who enjoy deathbed-confession narratives
• Fans of unreliable narrators and psychological manipulation
• Readers who like maritime, domestic, and survival horror
• Those comfortable with violent and disturbing subject matter
• Readers who prefer episodic stories linked by a recurring narrator

It may be less suitable for readers seeking realistic police procedure, subtle literary horror, gentle mysteries, or sensitive depictions of psychiatric institutions.

Final Assessment

Murder for Hire gives the eighth volume of The Asylum Confession Files a focused and effective theme. Its four patients represent different ways of converting murder into work, profit, performance, or sport.

Ernest embodies cold-blooded efficiency. Tommy carries death into the isolation of the sea. Shannon combines widow imagery with blood, money, and intimate betrayal. Jimmy Dale treats human beings as prey to be hunted. Each brings a distinct form of danger to Steen’s ward.

The book’s most interesting idea is that paid murder does not end with the person who performs it. Behind every contract may be another guilty party—someone who selected the victim, offered compensation, and remained hidden while the killer took the risk. A truthful confession could expose that person, but a false confession could protect the guilty or implicate the innocent.

Steen therefore faces more than four dying murderers. He faces four people whose work required them to conceal motives, erase evidence, and lie convincingly. Their bodies may be failing, but their ability to manipulate him remains intact.

Dark, episodic, and unapologetically sensational, Murder for Hire continues the series’ central exploration of violence, confession, and doubt. The patients arrive with secrets, Steen offers them a final bargain, and the reader is left to decide whether the truth can ever be separated from the killer selling it.