Billie and her three colleagues – Mary Alice, Helen, and Natalie – are gearing up for retirement. After forty years of being international assassins, it’s time to hang up their weapons. Their organisation, The Museum, sends them on a fabulous cruise as part of the send off, but in the midst of the festivities they discover they’re being targeted by one of their own. Only the top level of the Museum can order a hit, and once they get our of their sticky situation, they’re on the run to find out why they’ve been targeted and work out a plan to stop it.
Thankfully, given that they’ve been at this some time, they have some back up in the form of Minka, who can procure identity documents at the drop of a hat, and a secret house they all happen to be familiar with. Once in a home base, they set to tracking down the Board of the Museum, in an attempt to get their lives back.
I really enjoyed this. It is a fun and quick read with a plot that doesn’t let up much. It does mean we don’t always get to spend as much time with the characters as I would like (the three women apart from Billie can become a bit interchangeable, which is a shame) but it was so engaging that I didn’t mind so much. It flashes back to when they all first joined the Museum and their initial training and first jobs, nicely tying in with the people they will later have to kill. There’s rarely much of a sense of danger in terms of ‘will they get out of this’, because of course they will, but how they do it is clever and fun (if sometimes convenient). I also liked that not all of them married/had kids, and that Billie says at one point that she’s lived exactly the kind of life she always wanted for herself. More books like this with older women in please.