Killers of a Certain Age - Book Review

 

The book choice for my book club over the last month was Killers of a Certain Age. This is a book about a group of women who are paid assassins who have been working for "The Museum" for 40 years and are told they are being forced into retirement. However, they find out that they are not quietly going into retirement. They have a bounty placed on their heads. Through the book we are taken through the process of finding out why they have a bounty on their heads and what they do about it. 

When I was told the basic plot of the book, I was quite excited to read this book. For the most part, it is a good book. My main complaint is that the flash backs in the first half of the book are not in good places. Through the flashbacks, we learn how they are recruited, trained, and build relationships within the company. These are important bits of information, but I feel like it would have been better had they been at the beginning of the book and used a flash forward type of thing as the book went on. Another thing that may have worked would have been somehow including the recruiting and training into the dialog. I'm not a writer, so I don't even know if that would work. I just didn't like how the author would have a cliff hanger at the end of a chapter then suddenly change to something from the past. Again, this is only a criticism of the first half of the book. In the second half of the book, flashbacks were used to show the relationship between the main characters and the people they were perusing. This felt like a good use of flashbacks. (I'm not a total hater of the flashbacks. I just think it is used wrong or too much in a lot of novels now days.) The good part of the book is that the basics of the plot move along at a good pace. The imagery was perfect with not too much description but enough to really know, understand, and feel a part of what was going on. Overall, I gave this book 3 stars on Goodreads. I will probably not read the second book because I was satisfied with the ending of the book and don't feel the need to. One person in my book club read it and said it was ok but not as good as the first one. 

It took me almost 2 weeks longer to read than it should have (my deadline was July 16, but I finished today). This was not because it was a bad book. I have traveled over the last month which slowed me down, and I spent way too much time on my phone over the last few months. One of these days, I will give myself more time to read like I did at the beginning of the year.