Killers of a Certain Age - Deanna Raybourn

Deanna Raybourn's series novels are not really a good match for my reading tastes, so Killers of a Certain Age, a 2022 standalone of Raybourn's, is my first exposure to her fiction. And as it turns out, I'm surprised at how much fun I had reading this wild story about four sixty-something ex-assassins who come out of retirement to prove that they can still kill with the best of them. There's so much to like about this one that it's hard to know where to start.

What first caught my eye was the book's title. It seems that there's a lot of Boomer Fiction out there these days, but most of it is rather gloomy stuff dealing with end-of-life situations as Boomers reluctantly acknowledge that theirs is the next generation to give up the world stage. It's either that or stories about foolish old men and women who escape the facility just long enough to run off on some final adventure that mostly exists only inside their own heads. So when I spotted a title that sounded as if it might be about Boomers who not only had their wits about them but were still good at what they did, I grabbed it. 

But that alone would not have been enough to get me to read Killers of a Certain Age if the plot, the prose, and the characters had not been as exceptional as the novel's title. Mary Alice, Helen, Natalie, and Billie were recruited and trained as an all-female team of assassins in 1978 "to eliminate people who need killing" by a group that called itself The Museum. When it ran out of Nazi war criminals on the run, the group turned its attention to "dictators, arms dealers, drug smugglers, and sex traffickers." Forty years after their first mission, the women have been forced into retirement - and now they learn that The Museum has placed a kill order on the heads of each of them. So there's your big check mark on my exceptional plot requirement.

And despite the book's ultimately high body-count, the prose is filled with the kind of cleverness and wit that I always enjoy and find to be great fun. So another check mark goes to the prose.

Finally, the characters, all of them making the best of whatever level of physical and mental skills they still have, are fun to watch. These women have kind of a Golden Girls vibe to them, especially in how they relate to each other, but that's misleading because each has made four or five successful hits on the bad guys every year for the last four decades. They are as bloody and coldhearted as they have to be, but they still make you laugh with them and love them. 

For much of the twentieth century, Mary Alice, Helen, Natalie, and Billie were some of the best killers out there. But now someone wants to kill them - and the ladies are having none of it. Killers of a Certain Age is a whole lot of fun.