Author of A Curious Beginning, Deanna Raybourn is a talented contemporary novelist. She has several award nominations including Edgar Award and two RT Reviewer’s Choice Awards. Her new book Killers of a Certain Age is a contemporary adult mystery thriller fiction. Released on September 6th, 2022, this book already has 12,701 ratings and 2,116 reviews on Goodreads. So, let’s get into the book review of Killers of a Certain Age by Deanna Raybourn.
Older women often feel that they are invisible. However, sometimes that’s their secret weapon. And, assassins are typically well-built and muscular men. Four women – Billie, Mary Alice, Helen, and Natalie have been an employee of an elite network assassin for forty years, named the Museum.
This institution “dispatches agents to safeguard democracy, to thwart absolutism, and enact justice.” The organization only kill bad people, started out killing the Nazis, and then moved to drug smugglers, dictators, sex traffickers, and more. These four friends start as Project Sphinx the first female squad enlisted in 1978. The four women used to take out human rights violators and recover stolen art during the Holocaust. They have been in this business since around the 1970s and it’s almost their retirement time. At present, their skills are old school and they don’t get enough applause. Their skill is not beneficial in an age where technology comes first.
When four of them are sent on a paid trip to mark their retirement, they have been provided with a paid cruise to celebrate. But when they realize that someone from their organization is aboard in disguise, they began to suspect. Only the top-level members of the Museum board can pass the termination order of the field agents. The women get to realize that they are probably a target for demise. But who gave the order and why? Why would anyone want to kill four women in their 60s?
Now, to get out of the situation alive, they have to turn against their organization. They can rely on each other and know each other, they are aware if they work together they can survive. It is their old-school tactics and skills that can help them handle the situation. Billie, Mary Alice, Helen, and Natalie stuffed their fanny packs with detonators, poison syringes, pistols, and brass knuckles. These four women are on their way to teaching their organization what women and a killer do of a certain age.
Deanna Raybourn brings humor, danger, friendship, action, and a thriller with Killers of a Certain Age. The book is written from Billie’s perspective. It contains a few flashback scenes of the four women when they were just twenty-one years old. The flashbacks contained their recruitment days when they were undergoing the training stage and a few of their initial missions. Deanna Raybourn has the ability to make the characters relatable to the readers even though they were assassins. It is twisty, vividly described, fast-paced, and entirely entertaining. If you haven’t read Killers of a Certain Age make sure to do it as soon as possible.
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