by Deanna Raybourn ★★★★☆
I generally try to read the majority of the Top 25 or so books in Amazon's Editors' Top 100 of a given year, provided they sound like something I'd enjoy. Killers of a Certain Age checked all the boxes -- a mystery/thriller (perhaps the genre I read most) that clocked in at #26 in 2022 -- but for whatever reason, I kept putting it aside until this past week. I think I was suspecting it might be slightly derivative of The Thursday Murder Club (a book I enjoyed, but one I just don't need 7 versions of) with a group of women in their sixties the focus. But where TTMC is an eclectic group of seniors playing amateur detective, Killers of a Certain Age is something else entirely.
The story focuses on four women -- Billie (the main narrator), Mary Alice, Helen, and Natalie -- who were all recruited to join an international group of assassins known as "The Museum" while they were in college in the late 1970s. The Museum was originally founded to dole out vigilante justice following WWII, specifically tracking down and killing Nazis who had evaded capture. In conjunction, part of their mission was to locate art stolen by the Nazis and return it to the rightful owners.
Fast forward to 2019, and the women have effectively reached retirement age. To celebrate, the Museum has arranged a retirement cruise on an upscale 50-ish passenger boat in the Caribbean. It's the first time they've been together in years, but they settle into their familiar patterns and patter and start to imagine what life might be like without ever having to anticipate another ordered hit coming their way. It's all champagne by the pool and laughs until Billie recognizes one of The Museum's hitmen, masquerading as a deckhand on the boat. The women investigate, and quickly realize they have, for some reason, becomes targets of The Museum themselves.
What follows is their path to uncovering the "why" behind the shift in The Museum's perception of them, and their approach to clearing their name. Author Raybourn does a nice job of peppering in flashbacks throughout, to help layer in details that play a role in the modern-day story, as well as adding depth to the characters, and to Billie in particular. While we get glimpses of depth into the other women -- be it Helen's grieving over the loss of her husband, or Mary Alice's complicated relationship that has been built on lies (she never found the right. moment to share with her partner that she was an assassin) -- we don't get much more than their surface personalities. Billie, however, gets a fuller treatment, with more detail on her difficult upbringing, recruitment, training, and even love life than the others. I suppose it comes with narrator territory, but she's by far the most fully realized character of the four.
The story moves quickly, and it's a different take on traditional spycraft / assassin novels, which are typically male-dominated and almost always focus on a solo assassin. Also, as they say in every movie or book about assassins, "it's a young man's game", so reading about women in their 60s who can still kill you dozens of ways was a refreshing departure from a well-trod path.
I don't read a ton of books in the space, but when I do I seem to enjoy them. Back in 2014, I Am Pilgrim was my #2 book of the year (I would still highly recommend that one), and Seventeen: Last Man Standing was #6 in 2022. Killers of a Certain Age won't crack this year's top ten (it's closer to a 4.5 than a 5), but I enjoyed it. It's a well-executed (pun intended) novel, and a good quick read if you like these types of stories.