When readers think of senior sleuths nowadays, it’s more likely to be Richard Osman’s Thursday Murder Club sleuths than Miss Marple. Deanna Raybourn puts a new spin on senior crime fiction. When you think of Killers of a Certain Age, think of the movie RED. Think of assassins who hoped to retire only to discover they have a price on their heads. Those are the women of Raybourn’s outstanding, well-plotted story.

Billie Webster was a rebellious college student in 1978 when she was recruited to be part of a new team at “The Museum”. The Museum still had goals remaining from World War II when Billie joined. They were all former agents from OSS or other agencies who were still determined to be Nazis to justice. They trained assassins to do just that. Billie was to be trained with three other hand-selected young women to be part of the first all-female squad, training under “The Shepherdess”, Constance Halliday.

Billie, Helen, Mary Alice, and Natalie. Now, forty years later, the four women who assassinated dictators, arms dealers, drug smugglers, and sex traffickers, are retired. They’re taking a cruise together, hoping Helen will regain a little spirit after the death of her husband a year earlier. Mary Alice will have the chance to flirt, maybe pick up a man or two. Then, Billie recognizes one of the crew members as an assassin from The Museum. Why didn’t he make contact with one of them? It doesn’t take long for Billie to realize either he didn’t care if they were collateral damage on the ship, or one of them was his target. Or, maybe all four women were expendable now that they were retired.

From the moment Billie realizes The Museum has an assassination plan, Killers of a Certain Age moves into high gear. The team once known as “Project Sphinx” has no plans to be targets for anyone’s plot. The book is a fast-paced, engaging thriller as the women use all of their skills, developed over forty years, to stay alive and take out the people who plan to kill them.

Even if you only recognize Deanna Raybourn’s name from her Veronica Speedwell novels, you should realize that any assassins created by the author will have a great deal of skill and knowledge. And, of course, they are all smart enough to know that women of a certain age will be underestimated. Killers of a Certain Age, and a certain sex, should not be underestimated.

Deanna Raybourn’s website is https://www.deannaraybourn.com/

Killers of a Certain Age by Deanna Raybourn. Berkley, 2022. ISBN 9780593200681 (hardcover), 368p.

FTC Full Disclosure – I read an ARC for review for a journal.