In ten words or less: Retired female assassins: promising premise, fumbles in execution.
Retired female assassins are staring down the barrel of retirement when they’d rather still be staring down the barrel of a gun. They miss the action, but they’ve earned their rest and a cruise seems like, well, like something to do with plenty of time on their hands. The contract on the hitman trope is popular in books and in movies. However, Raybourn has taken us away from male characters and even the male gaze. This book is a Charlie’s Angels meets John Wick mash-up, and though it sounds great, it failed to hold my attention.
I’m obsessed with The Thursday Murder Club series (my favorite read of last year) so I went into this with that comparison in mind and the foursome of this novel can’t really compete with the foursome in Osman’s series. Where he spends a lot of time developing his characters, Raybourn doesn’t do enough to get me emotionally invested in any of hers. It’s got a bit of a Golden Girls riff, where each person is pigeonholed from each character’s introduction, and they don’t really grow from there. Also, each character is more defined by their relationships than by their own merits or traits. You’ve got the loner/leader, the obviously sexy one, the one who is mourning her dead husband, and the one protecting her wife. I just finished this book a few weeks ago but that’s really all I remember: they were pretty unremarkable. The action dragged and there wasn’t enough intrigue or suspense. It felt like they spent more time planning their actions than actually doing anything.
If the system allowed for fractions, I think I’d give this a 2.5. By the end of the book, I liked it more than I did when I was in the middle but overall it was a pretty forgettable read. I’m always going to give female-centric stories a try, but this was a bit too “by the numbers” for me.