Tour Review - - Killers of a Certain Age

Killers of a Certain Age

by Deanna Raybourn

Publisher: Berkley

Release Date: September 6, 2022

Reviewed by Hellie

  

Older women often feel invisible, but sometimes that’s their secret weapon.

They’ve spent their lives as the deadliest assassins in a clandestine international organization, but now that they're sixty years old, four women friends can’t just retire – it’s kill or be killed in this action-packed thriller by New York Times bestselling and Edgar Award-nominated author Deanna Raybourn.

Billie, Mary Alice, Helen, and Natalie have worked for the Museum, an elite network of assassins, for forty years. Now their talents are considered old-school and no one appreciates what they have to offer in an age that relies more on technology than people skills.

When the foursome is sent on an all-expenses paid vacation to mark their retirement, they are targeted by one of their own. Only the Board, the top-level members of the Museum, can order the termination of field agents, and the women realize they’ve been marked for death.

Now to get out alive they have to turn against their own organization, relying on experience and each other to get the job done, knowing that working together is the secret to their survival. They’re about to teach the Board what it really means to be a woman—and a killer—of a certain age.

Hellie’s Heeds

Part Charlie’s Angels (movie version), part RED, this book delivers the action and antics one would expect of a story where the main characters are the underestimated underdogs. (In one of the descriptors of this book, it was pitched as The Golden Girls meets James Bond–which is also apt, but for me, when I heard the premise, I was immediately, “Oh, it’s RED but all women! I’m in!” The Charlie’s Angels bit came a bit later when I was immersed in the world of the four women, mainly Billie’s POV, who reminds me of Drew Barrymore’s character in the Charlie’s Angels movies, and the hilarious shenanigans the Angels did to accomplish their goals.) Normally I would offer more details of the story itself (sometimes the blurb doesn’t really do the actual story justice) but in this case, the blurb is exactly what is happening: these very dangerous women aren’t being allowed to have the quiet retirement they have earned. The organization where they’ve worked for 40 years has issued a termination order for them, and it takes all their cunning to stay ahead of the kill shots and take out the organization instead. 

If you ever were curious how to make a death look natural, you will definitely get an idea how to do so; as well as some truth how even the best thought out plan can go awry when the bad guy has a gun and a twitchy trigger finger. Also the very real need for a personal trainer to keep one in the physical shape needed to crawl around in the catacombs of France or outmaneuver the assassin who is trying to kill you. I love the fact that no matter how old these women are, they are the same women as they were when they were 20, which I think in our culture (maybe in all cultures), we forget and treat women of a certain age as well, not people. It’s a smack on the nose of the patriarchy that just because a woman isn’t “young”, she isn’t sexy or smart or relevant any longer, that she doesn’t deserve to be a heroine (main attraction) just because she’s over the age of 40. So yes, it’s some good feminist fiction. 

My only beef with the story is the writing style for the “flashbacks.” The current scenes, first person POV of Billie, are smooth and well-paced, easy to follow, and the dialogue and banter are hysterical. However, the flashbacks almost always drew me out of the story and made it a bit too easy to set the book aside to go do something else, which is a problem when you’re reading something that needs a review by a particular date. It wasn’t that the flashbacks weren’t necessary; when I did get into them, the content was relevant and also well-paced, but it was written in third-person present-tense omniscient, which meant for me it had two pet peeves of mine: head-hopping (thus no deep point-of-view) and flashbacks (things that already occurred) told in present tense. It made me crackers. However, not everyone is as precious about the type of tense used in story writing, so this might not bother most readers. There are a ton of YA novels that others rave about that I won’t touch because it’s in present tense. I’m just sharing my opinion about this in case anyone wonders, “Why only 4 ½ stars? Are you only somewhat feminist, Hellie?” No, no, I’m wholeheartedly feminist; I’m anti-present tense is all. 

That said: I think if you like a good romp with your girlfriends, if you think of your girlfriends as “ride or die” friends, this is a book to celebrate those relationships. Also, I am wondering if we might see these women again. I feel like the ending is left open to the possibility of another book, and I want to remind everyone that RED 2 was even funnier than the first RED.

Guest Review - - A Spear of Summer Grass

A Spear of Summer Grass

By Deanna Raybourn

Publisher: Harlequin Mira

Release Date: April 30, 2013

(at times edging toward 4 stars)

Delilah Drummond is her mother’s daughter—an often-married socialite who excels at spending money and flirting with scandal. But when Delilah’s most recent husband commits suicide immediately after receiving divorce papers and Delilah, who has maintained her own name, refuses to surrender the royal jewels that she has inherited from the man who made her his widow before she could make him her ex and refuses to adopt an appropriately remorseful attitude, the resulting scandal reaches international proportions. There are rumors of an investigation being opened, and her maternal grandfather in Louisiana is making noises about cutting off all financial support. Delilah’s mother, her favorite former step-father, and her lawyer and former husband #2 are in agreement that Delilah must leave Paris.

Delilah refuses to consider America where Prohibition is the law of the land, but she has fond memories of the fascination her step-father’s African diary held for her when she read it as a teenager. Thus, when he offers her Fairlight, the home he built on the banks of Lake Wanyama, Delilah agrees to accept exile from Europe. Two weeks later, accompanied by a distant Drummond cousin and poor relation, Dora, or Dodo, Delilah sets sail on a British ship for Mombasa. The dutiful, dull Dodo, whose two interests are God and gardens, will serve as a combination chaperone and personal maid.

From the moment of her arrival in Kenya, Delilah begins to learn just how different Kenya is from the world she has left, and yet, strangely, some things remain the same. The violence and beauty of the country leave her weak-kneed. She is still in the Nairobi train station when she sees a man beaten so severely that his blood splashes on her shoes, and before she arrives at Fairlight, she has her forehead marked with the blood of a buffalo she helped to kill, signifying “first African blood.” But her reputation has preceded her, and the lieutenant governor, concerned that she might become involved in escapades that would reflect badly on Kenya, insists that she cannot linger in Nairobi. She soon finds old friends in the area and joins them in a lifestyle that, despite the setting, is as hedonistic as the one she left in Paris.

Delilah also finds that the nursing skills she acquired for service in World War I are useful in this new environment, and she shocks and angers some by her humane treatment of the Blacks in her employ. Through all of these experiences, there is safari guide J. Ryder White, an arrogant, complex alpha with a core of tenderness, who infuriates her, challenges her, and fascinates her. A part of and yet distinct from the British expatriate community, Ryder proves to be a “stayer,” the kind of man Delilah never expected to encounter again. But Delilah must change before her heart is willing to accept that truth.

Raybourn leaves her popular Lady Julia Gray series to give readers this standalone novel that combines historical fiction with murder mystery and a substantial thread of romance. Set amid the decadence of the wealthy in the1920s and three years after Kenya had been declared a British crown colony, the story includes both the sparkle and the darkness of the period. The racial conflicts between the European colonials, the Africans, and the Indians are growing and shaping the politics of the era, and the lavish lifestyle of the European community is a stark contrast to the injustice and exploitation of colonialism. Raybourn uses all of this history in the story of a woman who embodies its contradictions and complexities.

I had a really difficult time deciding how to “grade” this book. Deanna Raybourn is an amazing writer, and her skills are evident from the opening line to the final one. Her vivid descriptions of Kenya frequently made me feel as if I were watching a movie on a theater screen rather than reading a book. That was the effect of this description:

A tiny herd of elephants looked infinitesimal from our lofty height, and when Ryder stilled the engine, I heard nothing but the long rush of wind up from the valley floor. It carried with it every promise of Africa, that wind. It smelled of green water and red earth and the animals that roamed it. And there was something more, something old as the rocks. It might have been the smell of the Almighty himself, and I knew there were no words for this place. It was sacred, as no place I had ever been before.

Her prose is always beautifully lucid and often lyrical as well. When Delilah arrives at Fairlight expecting to see the place she had imagined when she was a child and finds instead a house falling apart, she expresses her disillusionment:

Of all emotions, disappointment is the most difficult to hide. Rage, hatred, envy—those are easy to mask. But disappointment strikes to the heart of the child within us, resurrecting every unsatisfactory Christmas, every failed wish made on a shooting star.

The poignancy of some passages is powerfully moving, as in this passage when Delilah responds to Dodo's question about whether Delilah ever loved any of the men in her life after her first husband:

You close your eyes and suddenly he’s not there anymore. What you loved, or thought you loved, just isn’t there, and there is a man-shaped hole in your memory of where he used to be. The sad part is when it happens when he’s sitting at the same table or lying in the same bed. You can turn and look at him and not even remember his name because he was just a visitor. He was a man who was only passing through your heart, and you never really made a place for him, so he just keeps passing. My husbands since Johnny have been passing men. Not a stayer among them.

At the other end of the emotional spectrum are tiny details that left me with a delighted smile, details such as Delilah’s car, a lipstick-red Hispano-Suiza with leopard upholstery that seems perfect for her and also evoked images of the Hispano-Suiza in P. G. Wodehouse’s Blandings Castle short stories and novels and the book, Fordyce’s Sermons, which Delilah had to balance on her head when learning to walk like a lady. (Fordyce’s Sermons is the 1767 guidebook to female conduct from which Mr. Collins read to the Bennet sisters in Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice.)

In the con column is a heroine I could not like. Delilah is at times entertaining, she is more rarely sympathetic, and she is always interesting, but she is also, for much of the book, selfish, shallow, and amoral. She treats her cousin with condescension some times and with careless cruelty at other times. When she spends her last night in Paris with former husband #2, a married man with two young children, she thinks she may even be rendering a service to his wife since he’s jollier after sex with Delilah and the guilt over his infidelity leads him to purchase an expensive present for his wife. The list of her offenses that the lieutenant governor in Nairobi names include “stealing a car outside a Harlem nightclub and driving it into the Hudson” and being “caught in flagrante with a judge’s eighteen-year-old son in Dallas.”  Granted Delilah changes, but by that time, I disliked so many things about her that I could not feel any real connection with her. I’m not a reader who needs to identify with the heroine, but I do, especially with the intimacy between character and reader that comes with a first person point of view, need to like her.

If the vivid evocation of time and place, an atypical heroine and hero, and wonderful prose are sufficient to make you love a book, you may be one of the readers giving A Spear of Summer Grass high marks. If likeable characters are a prime criterion for you, you may, as I did, have mixed reactions to this novel.

~Janga
http://justjanga.blogspot.com