Billie, Mary Alice, Natalie and Helen have spent the last forty years working for "The Museum," an elite group of assassins who got their start during and after World War II hunting down Nazis. As they ran out of Nazis, The Museum sets their sights on other desirable targets. Drug cartels, human traffickers, dictators, despots etc. Our group of four women were hand-picked by The Museum for "special skills" they see in them, to be trained as the first all-female squad of assassins since World War II.
Forty years later, all in their 60s, the women are retiring with a posh, all-expenses paid cruise funded by their soon to be former employer. The cruise starts out unremarkable enough until Billie spies one of The Museum's assassins on the boat disguised as a crew member. That could mean that the four have stumbled their way into a mission, but that seems unlikely since The Museum funded this cruise for them. Nope, it can only mean one thing - their soon-to-be-former employer wants to make all four of them soon-to-be-formerly breathing.
What follows is a race to outfox The Museum and get to the bottom of why the agency wants all four of them dead. Only the Board can order the termination of a field agent, and The Museum has always been methodical in their research department - potential hits being investigated sometimes for years, down to the type of underwear they like to wear and how they take their coffee. None of it makes any sense.
While there are four characters, this story is told from Billie's point of view, sort of the defacto leader of their group. The story also features timeline shifts, with the bulk of the story taking place in present day and chapters interspersed throughout about past missions, set in the early 1980s.
For a book about hired assassins the tone of this story is surprisingly light and frothy. It's also a lot of fun. I had a good time listening to it, I chuckled in a few spots, I enjoyed the story.
If you're thinking there's a but coming - well, you would be right.
Look, I love me some fiction with morally gray characters. Anti-heroes, tough guys, characters with a lot of tricky edges that don't always make them "nice." This is not a problem for me. For heaven's sake, I spent an entire year glomming through Lawrence Block's Matthew Scudder series.
The problem here is the author doesn't sit with the morally gray or the ethically dubious. Yes, yes our retiring assassins only kill "bad guys" but THEY'RE STILL KILLING PEOPLE FOR A LIVING! There's a brief conversation between Billie and one of the others about "guilt" which basically ends with Billie saying (paraphrasing) "What are you talking about, I sleep just fine at night," but beyond that - nothing.
There's no unpacking being done, and that's a problem because our Girl Gang tends to come off as naïve. Much hay is made over how The Museum runs it's operations and yet not one of them stops and thinks for a moment that this system could be corrupted. Give human beings enough time (and it usually doesn't take as long as you'd think) and everything is corruptible. It just is. It's the special sauce that makes humans human (and generally speaking why we're terrible - Lord, it might be time for me to read a nice romance novel I'm extra jaded at the moment...)
To put it more succinctly the author never takes the reader beyond You Go Girl!
There's nothing wrong with this per se. It's an authorial choice. But what that authorial choice ends up being is Fun Beach Read. And that's what this was for me. I had a good time reading it so long as I didn't stop and think about it for too long. Because once I started doing that? I realized it's the kind of book I'd tell people, "It's a fun read, but it could have been great."
Final Grade = B
3 comments:
I often wonder how authors make these decisions. Was the idea to go for the Mr & Mrs Smith "relax, it's just a story" vibe? Which, of course, is both their prerogative and often quite successful, financially, especially when the author can write.
But of course, the automatic consequence of that choice is that any attempt to read the characters as people will have to find them wanting. As Kay said in her review, it may succeed as pure (in the sense of uncomplicated, thoughtless) entertainment, but it fails otherwise.
I really enjoyed this one when I listened to it, and I'm interested in the follow up that the author is penning. With books like this, I just suspend my reality filter and enjoy, and sometimes the more outrageous, the better. I liked that the friendships aren't perfect, and that it wasn't always easy. And in my head, I see Dorthy, Blanche, Sophia, and Rose as some kickass assassins.
AL: That's it for me. Yes, this feels very Mr. & Mrs. Smith to me - going for that fun, relax and enjoy the ride vibe. But, but, but...so much baggage left ignored. Also the fact that these hired killers who had been working in the "profession" for 40 years weren't jaded AF was a bridge too far for me to accept. Of course we didn't get a truly jaded James Bond until Daniel Craig so....
Jen: Yeah, that's notable - that the friendships weren't perfect. All of these women had foibles that got on each other's nerves but they also recognized each other's strengths.
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