For These Women, It’s Kill or Be Killed

Kills Well With Others

By Deanna Raybourn

In Raybourn’s “Killers of a Certain Age” (2022), four female assassins on a celebratory retirement cruise discovered their lives were in danger. It was a fresh and fun adventure with a steel-toed kick. Now the quartet returns in the equally delightful KILLS WELL WITH OTHERS (Berkley, 356 pp., $29).

Billie, Mary Alice, Natalie and Helen have been reunited because “the Museum,” the off-the-books government agency that once employed them, has summoned them to a meeting in Virginia. It turns out that they’re on a kill list that’s somehow connected to their very first mission, in 1979. “We posed as stewardesses on a private plane in order to take out Boris Lazarov, a Bulgarian assassin. He had a flair for torture, if I remember,” Mary Alice says. Once again, the women have to save their own lives, and prevent more murders.

They globe-trot, tussle, scuffle and, yes, kill when they have to. “I realized that there are some jobs you leave, but they never leave you,” muses Billie, once again the arch, world-weary narrator. “I was playing at being retired because the truth was, I would be a killer until the day I died.”

Glory Daze

By Danielle Arceneaux

Arceneaux also focuses her attention on women of a certain age, specifically Glory Broussard of Lafayette, La., who takes a second bow in GLORY DAZE (Pegasus Crime, 295 pp., $27.95).

Glory is still recovering from her unwitting turn as an amateur detective in the unforgettable “Glory Be,” when she helped solve the murder of a friend. “It was attention that she had relished at first, but now it made her itchy with discomfort.” She’s working her weekly Sunday bookie stint when an unusual visitor arrives with a plea for help: Her husband is missing. It turns out the husband in question is Glory’s ex, Sterling Broussard, who left her long ago for the woman now standing before her. Glory takes the case — she figures she owes it to the daughter she and Sterling share — but when she finds him, there’s an expensive chef’s knife embedded in his chest.