Reviews with content warning for Murder - Killers of a Certain Age

So this book wasn’t bad! The premise was really promising, though I’m not sure the actual story itself lived up to that promise. The writing was fine, the characters were fine. It’s just that because the premise was so intriguing, just “fine” did end up disappointing me. The book REALLY picked up at the end, to the point I flew through the last quarter of the book, so kudos for the compelling drama. Onto the problems.

The first thing I noticed right off the bat was that the author seemed to be allergic to contractions. There’s nothing wrong with a little “I am” versus “I’m,” but we do have a issue when it’s being used almost exclusively, especially in dialogue. No one talks like that. No one says “I am tired, I am covered in mud…and I am hungry,” which is exactly what our main character Billie said on page 254. And it’s not just Billie who talks like that, it’s everyone, and it makes everyone sound like an automaton, robotic and unrealistic. And the author is from Texas! English isn’t her second language, so I’m unsure why or how this choice came about.

If that’s where the problems with characterization ended, I could get over it. Unfortunately, though, the characters fell a little short for me. Billie especially felt like an avatar you choose in a video game: you get a general backstory and some player stats, but otherwise her sole purpose is to guide you through the game. Despite the fact that the book is from her point of view, I don’t really think I knew or liked her at all. She fell too flat. Even when she shouldn’t have been, she was the center of all the action, to the point where it was difficult to believe the other women were even trained as assassins because Billie appeared to be doing all the heavy lifting in terms of physical and mental skills. I was on the cusp of liking the other three — Helen, Mary Alice, and Natalie — but they also were too empty for me to really get to know, especially since we’re told very little about them. We’re told about how awesome these women are, but we only really see it a handful of times in the first half of the book, just a little more in the second half, and the rest of the time we’re told that Helen’s gotten bad at her job because she lost her husband, or Nat’s guilty over having killed people for forty years, or Mary Alice is too preoccupied with her wife to really do things “the right way.”

But oh no, Billie’s practically perfect. Does everything by the book. The voice of reason. The leader. It gave her a smug, all knowing, holier-than-thou air that became more unbearable as time went on. Every good idea had to come from Billie. Every reasonable word had to come from Billie: Helen complains the wine is shit, and Billie corrects her that it gets the job done. They need to kill the guy in Paris, oh well Billie knows where he is. They need to get off the boat, Billie knows a guy. They have to take down the last bad guy, Billie has an idea and on top of that, has figured out who actually betrayed them! Raybourn was trying too hard with her, I think. The other women needed to have equal effort and contribution in what was happening, but they didn’t.

It all ended up being little too neat, a little too easy, especially at the end.

They happen to gain important information because people happen to talk to them. They happen to have spoken with the very men they need to kill, who happened to have told them the very information necessary to kill them, and Billie happens to remember exactly that information even decades later. She happens to have rescued a Ukrainian girl who is expert at technology, and happens to have an out-of-the-way safe house off the grid even though none of the others do (except MAYBE Helen, though you could argue hers wasn’t intended to be a safe house and so it’s not the same thing).

All of it edged just shy of being believable because it was all so damn convenient.

We also spent far too much time on the set up, the “mystery,” for the payoff to be good enough. They spend way too much time in the book clueless, which wouldn’t be an issue if they then didn’t solve two thirds of their problem in a handful of chapters.

Like, it’s really that easy to kill two of the most powerful members of an underground assassin organization. That’s crazy.

Speaking of the assassin organization! That was the hardest thing to buy into. It was all very…fantasy-like. A group of killers going around “defending democracy”? Getting rid of autocrats and dictators and fascists? It sounds like something I’d have daydreamed of in high school, before I recognized the underlying historical, social, and economic problems that allow all those bad leaders to take power. You get rid of the bad leader, and all that groundwork is still in place, untouched and ready for someone else to take over. Not to mention that the vast majority of non-democracies are in the global south, which means that functionally this group of white people, bitter at being set aside after World War II, went around, yes, killing Nazis, but when they ran out of Nazis they went to formerly colonized countries — just recently decolonized from THEIR OWN countries — and killed people there too.

It’s just so idealistic! And it unfortunately trods into the delusional. They’re all about “the same values for which every Allied soldier in the war gave his life” — what kinda bullshit propaganda are they peddling? Allied soldiers gave their lives because the powers that be sent them into a war of their own making, to fight for a cause they had no hand in creating. Sure, in hindsight, the Second World War had a clear bad guy, but I don’t know that that was most Allied troops’ reasoning for going to war: not to “defend democracy,” but to avenge their own country, which had just been attacked by the Germans or the Japanese. I’m not too sure many of them were all like “yeah let’s go save some democracy!” so much as “let me stop these guys from attacking my family and friends.” Having the Museum exist for this “higher purpose” of killing “bad guys” seems a weird way to sanitize assassination, to make it okay that these women are killing because they’re doing GOOD killing.

And the organization itself also suffers from the same soapy clean feeling as our protagonists.

You’re telling me this murder organization without any official oversight is only just now dealing with corruption? That’s so unrealistic.

And the idealism of these women and their “mission” felt far too idiotic for their characters. Anyone who studies even a modicum of history knows that any generation coming after the one that has founded an organization based on “changing the world” is less focused on the organization’s original values and more focused on the preservation of the organization itself, which enriches them. As time goes on, they become less concerned about the survival of the organization, and more concerned with consolidating power and money for themselves. That’s logical. The Museum’s founders cared deeply about exterminating the Nazis, of course they did: they were the Nazis’ victims. Once the Nazis were taken care of they turned their trauma towards exterminating anyone who might one day be a Nazi, or victimize others in the ways they were victimized. Sure. That makes sense. But then the people who didn’t have direct experience with those people? The people whose hate for those people was learned not through war, but regular life? The people whose rage was passed down by parents, or history itself? No, they have less of a commitment to the Museum’s goal. And as time goes on, their commitment decreases as their personal riches increase.

All this to say: what kind of dumbfuck so-called revolutionary, what kind of shit for brains supposed genius, believes that a clandestine, extra-governmental organization wouldn’t eventually start killing for profit, or keeping the recovered art for themselves, or try to seize control and privatize a fleet of killing machines? Like, girl, I know you asked the essential question of who’s paying you when you were EIGHTEEN, but that’s not where your diligence or vigilance ends.

Other than that! I almost wish we could’ve focused mostly on the recruitment and training of these four girls, them learning to work together and fight together and lean on each other. I think their friendship would have been more believable and endearing if we’d seen it grow, rather than been dumped in the twilight of it. I’m not even sure how they kept in touch if they were always on different projects. If the book had been focused on that — these girls turned women trying to maintain their friendships with the only people who understand them — and then turned into a deadly chase where they revert back to their girlhood and can only rely on each other, that would have been a much more fun ride. Especially if they sprinkled in some good old-fashioned internal struggling with the fact that, oh yeah! They’re killing people! And can they really trust the people who say they’re killing only BAD people? We glossed a little too quickly over that part.

I did enjoy a good bit of the flashbacks (except when it became very clearly a plot device to move the story forward and explain things that didn’t make sense), especially the focus on Constance Halliday and finding girls to train. I also liked the chase and tension of trying to kill the Big Bad, but wish it had taken place over more of the book so that we could have properly felt the tension and stakes of that mission.

Beyond that, it was an intriguing, easy read. The switch from third person to first person POV felt like a personal betrayal, but I got over it quickly (though I do believe keeping the third person POV might have mitigated the problem with Billie). Overall, again, the story was decent: quick-paced and interesting enough to keep my attention the whole way through.

Content Warnings

kimberleyw12's review against another edition

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adventurous mysterious tense medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Plot
Strong character development? No
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
Flaws of characters a main focus? No

4.0

Content Warnings

bmpicc's review against another edition

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adventurous funny mysterious fast-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? No
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
Flaws of characters a main focus? No

3.0

This was cute and quick which I like. It was not realistic to me though the way 'The Thursday Murder Club' could be. Assassin in my 60's, probably not. Joining a cold case murder club with my friends in my 60's, absolutely! That aside, it was a perfect palate cleanser for this avid reader.

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