The older I get, the more out of touch I feel with the twenty-something heroines in certain books. The romance genre especially has a lot of really young heroines, and my 45-yr-old self has a hard time, sometimes, not rolling her eyes at just how young they actually are/act, or how implausibly far away 27 feels at this point. Which is not to say that I am ready to read only the quiet, cozy mysteries that seem most populated by people older – and still less relatable to me – than my own mother (who was a teenage mom, so yes, that math works out). That said, you put some kickass sixty-year-olds in a book? And I’m going to be all over that. And that’s just what Deanna Raybourn has done in Killers of a Certain Age.
As anyone who’s read any of Raybourn’s work can tell you, she is great with quips & witty one-liners – A skill I quite admire, but in less talented hands, is often not enough to stand on its own. Fortunately, she’s just as good at creating the most random, unique & romp-worthy adventures for a tale set in two different time periods, a true then & now piece. Both the way-back-whens and the nowadays versions of the plot are crisp, energetic and full of intrigue, as any good spy novel should be.
“Forty years on one of the most elite assassin squads on earth and it finished like this, with a free cruise and a bouncy letter from a girl who signed her letters with hashtags.”
At the start of the book, we are introduced to four about-to-retire assassins, four women over sixty, members of a squad called the Sphinxes, who find out their agency (a bunch of post WWII leftovers who set out to find -& finish off- the final Nazis) was actually planning a much more permanent form of retirement for them. Naturally, they object, and while they may be thinking the proverbial “I’m getting too old for this shit,” they set out to prove they are not, in fact, too old to keep justice from prevailing, and clearing their own names. Along the way, there’s plenty of time for feminist truths, the indignities of aging, a lost love or two, and hard life lessons that boomerang around until our characters finally learn them.
“And then the bastard smiled at me. He smiled the same smile I’d seen a thousand times. A hundred thousand. It was the smile that said, ‘I know best.’ The smile that said, ‘I’m better than you.’ The smile that said, ‘I’m safe here and you’re not.’ The smile that said, ‘I have a dick, so I win.’
Rage rolled up in me like the sea and I felt it sweep over my head, threatening to drown me. And then I heard a voice, small but still. A voice I hadn’t heard in forty years. I closed my eyes and listened. ‘It isn’t your anger that will make you good at this job, it is your joy.’ The rage ebbed and, in its place, only happiness. Fierce, rampant happiness. It wasn’t the prettiest fight I’d ever been in but it was the most ferocious.”
Filled with flashbacks including their recruitment, & first missions from back in the 1970s, juxtaposed with their ever-evolving plan to clear their names & get back in the agency’s good books – if only to be able to retire in peace -, Killers of A Certain Age is fun & fast-paced. I listened to the audio, which had two narrators, one for present times & one for past, and both – Jane Oppenheimer & Christina Delaine – were excellent at keeping things moving & reflecting the humor of the text. Goodreads has a sequel, Kills Well with Others, listed for March 2025 publication, so I’ll be adding that to my TBR as well. The blurb on the book says “Golden Girls meets James Bond,” and while I don’t think that’s exactly right, it’s definitely got the gist of it nailed, so if that feels like something you’d be into, check this one out.