Title: Killers of a Certain Age
Author: Deanna Raybourn
Year published: 2022
Category: Adult fiction (thriller)
Pages: 368 pages
Rating: 4.5 out of 5
Location: (my 2022 Google Reading map): USA, UK, Tanzania/Zanzibar, France
Summary: They’ve spent their lives as the deadliest assassins in a clandestine international organization, but now that they're sixty years old, four women friends can’t just retire – it’s kill or be killed in this action-packed thriller by New York Times bestselling and Edgar Award-nominated author Deanna Raybourn.
Billie, Mary Alice, Helen, and Natalie have worked for the Museum, an elite network of assassins, for forty years. Now their talents are considered old-school and no one appreciates what they have to offer in an age that relies more on technology than people skills.
When the foursome is sent on an all-expenses paid vacation to mark their retirement, they are targeted by one of their own. Only the Board, the top-level members of the Museum, can order the termination of field agents, and the women realize they’ve been marked for death.
Now to get out alive they have to turn against their own organization, relying on experience and each other to get the job done, knowing that working together is the secret to their survival. They’re about to teach the Board what it really means to be a woman—and a killer—of a certain age.
Review: "Of a certain age" is such a phrase and we know what it means. Past her prime (because, let's be honest, it is used for women, not men). And, of course, one of them is named Helen. My name is associated with old(er) women (everyone has a grandmother named Helen). I love the idea of this novel: women who are officially past their prime taking on the system using the talents/skills taught to them by that very same system. And it's funny.
I like the way the chapters alternated between the present and the women tracking down the people who put a hit out on them and the late 1970s/early 1980s and telling stories of their assassinations. Through these stories we get a sense of the women, their talents, their personalities, and their enemies.
If you want to read a well written thriller that will make you smile as you read it, this is the one.
Challenges for which this counts:
- Literary Escapes--Zanzibar
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