by Deanna Raybourn ★★★★☆
For some reason, America (and perhaps the world) has a fascination with retirees that are involved in detective work and/or murder-for-hire. Whether it's Richard Osman's The Thursday Murder Club, Tess Gerritsen's The Spy Coast, the TV show Only Murders in the Building, or Deanna Raybourn's Killers of a Certain Age, they've all been successful and popular over the last few years. Raybourn's follow-up to her enjoyable 2023 novel picks up a few years after the events of that book, and our four main characters are back for another adventure.
To recap, the series 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 track down and kill Nazis who had evaded capture, with a secondary focus on reclaiming looted art and returning it to its rightful owners., With the world running out of Nazis, "the Museum turned its efforts to drug smugglers, arms dealers, human traffickers—folks who needed killing, in other words."
Our ladies, however, are retired, and fully intend to stay that way. But when there's a security breach at the Museum, and their identities are leaked to the child of a man they'd murdered decades prior, the women must once again mobilize and put to use their decades of plotting, tracking, and murdering experience in a game of "kill or be killed." Once again, we're treated to action-filled sequences paired with witty banter (and even a Schwarzenegger-esque pun after a killing) while layering in just enough seriousness to keep things from tipping too out of balance.
I enjoyed Killers of a Certain Age, to the point that it finished just outside my Top 20 in 2023. I'd forgotten about Raybourn's saucy sense of humor with her ladies; there's a good amount of humorous back-and-forth throughout that offsets any significant tension. Its fun, and the jocular tone it strikes, even during potentially perilous sequences, is reminiscent of James Bond movies in the 1980s before things got a lot more gritty and serious with Daniel Craig. This is a kick-back-and-enjoy-it type of book. It's well-structured and plotted (although at times a bit too conveniently), but it's one where you have a good idea that the good guys (or girls) are going to prevail in the end.
Raybourn does a nice job of succinctly recapping the first book and reminding the reader of the key pieces of information and events of that story, to the point that you could conceivably read this as a stand-alone novel. But why would you? If you haven't read either, start at the start with Killers of a Certain Age. And if you enjoyed the original Killers, I suspect you'll like this one at least as much, if not more. It fell a bit short of a 5-star book for me, mostly because of the lack of true tension, but it's a solid 4.5 that held my interest and attention throughout.
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