The lone-wolf hero is a familiar figure in crime fiction, but two new books by Deanna Raybourn and Juan Gómez-Jurado attest to the advantages of collaboration. That the female assassins in Kills Well with Others collaborate on murder flips the script somewhat—shouldn’t they be solving crimes together?—but, as they like to say, the world would be a better place without their targets.
Natalie, Mary Alice, Helen, and Billie were introduced in Killers of a Certain Age (2022), where they made quite an impression as 60-ish assassins for a private entity known as the Museum, who were targeted for extinction by someone inside the organization.
Having survived that, they stepped away for more relaxing pursuits but now find themselves yanked back into action for reasons of self-preservation. Someone is killing agents involved in the 1979 murder of a Bulgarian assassin, and if he continues, the four women will be next. Unless they stop him first.
Luckily, their mark is an Anglophile with fancy tastes and a flying phobia, so they get to carry out their plan aboard the Queen Mary 2, sailing to England.
Raybourn doesn’t ask us to take any of this too seriously, but she does want us to enjoy the ride. Besides possessing a vast arsenal of deadly skills, these ladies are at home anywhere in the world, have a James Bond–ian/Golden Girls way with a quip, and a figurative Birkin bag full of disguises, including adult diapers to get that lumpy rear-end look. As we know, there’s no one as invisible as a woman over 60, which is one of this quartet’s superpowers.
Complications ensue after the Q.M. 2 mission, sending the women all over Europe, from a rustic interlude in Sardinia to a caper in Venice involving an imperiled operatic baritone named Wolfgang. Despite its plentiful action, the book never feels rushed or frantic, and a helpful series of flashback chapters details the women’s previous assignments, pointing to its villain’s unexpected motivation.
In making her characters assassins, not usually a sympathetic profession, Raybourn walks up to a line but doesn’t cross it. If Black Doves viewers were fine with the winsome Ben Whishaw taking out a relative for cash, accepting this should be a breeze.
translated by Nick Caistor
and Lorenza Garcia
Though he does have quite a nasty accomplice, the criminal mastermind who gives White King its title is in a league of his own; he’s not just bad, he’s the apotheosis of evil. In Juan Gómez-Jurado’s third Red Queen novel, the mysterious Mr. White presents Antonia Scott with her greatest challenge yet. Antonia has a brilliant forensic mind that’s been engineered by Spain’s Red Queen project to solve crimes that elude ordinary mortals. When Antonia learns that three of Europe’s other Red Queens and their bodyguards have been dispatched in a focused burst of violence, she knows immediately who’s responsible. A summons from the likely suspect confirms it: “I hope you haven’t forgotten me. Do you want to play?”
In an eerie set piece in a café, he instructs Antonia to solve three crimes in a prescribed amount of time. If she doesn’t, he will kill her bodyguard, Jon Guttiérez, in an ingeniously awful way. The imposing gay Basque cop would give his life for Antonia, but that’s the last thing she wants, and so they set out to do Mr. White’s bidding.
Because time is now Antonia’s enemy, every move she makes must be essential. Gómez-Jurado measures each action and choice in increments of time, scattering numbers all over the page, ramping up the tension. He keeps his sentences and chapters short, but never blunt or hard-boiled.
The translation, by Nick Caistor and Lorenza Garcia, vividly captures the book’s distinctive voice. It’s present tense, brisk, and occasionally puckishly aphoristic: “By some miracle, no idiot has wrongfully occupied the disabled space, so Antonia parks there herself.”
Antonia’s thoughts are sometimes expressed in untranslatable words from obscure languages: “What she feels is åselichibå. In Oromo … [it’s] the ocean of tedium created by other people’s stupidity. A vast, agonizing weariness.... When it’s nobler in the mind not to fight but to lay down your arms.” We’re with you, Antonia.
But somehow she recharges, motivated by a power greater than Mr. White’s malevolence. Antonia doesn’t love many people, but her love for her bodyguard has been forged in fire. It’s been tested by every imaginable metric and survives, as has his love for her. When you strip away the murder and mayhem, that’s what White King is about.
In Season One of The Capture, the BBC’s hit spy thriller about the U.K.’s surveillance state, the Metropolitan Police’s young hotshot Rachel Carey (Holliday Grainger) is pretty much on her own.
While investigating what appears to be—bear with me—a slam-dunk case against a soldier (Callum Turner) accused of murdering the lawyer who got him acquitted of another murder, in Afghanistan, Rachel learns about a super-secret intelligence technique called “correction.” In her own expository words: “Correction—a method of real-time image manipulation, using the disruption of camera feeds and the deployment of deepfake technology.”
To her amazement, correction has been used by the C.I.A. and British counterterrorism spooks to doctor CCTV footage that seems to show the soldier roughing up his lawyer as she waits for a bus, which never happened. If you can’t trust your own eyes, what’s left? The ramifications are terrifying, especially in a country where surveillance cameras are ubiquitous.
After a semi-satisfying but not very reassuring resolution, the spies persuade the too-smart-for-her-own-good Carey to join them at SO15 as they blithely create collateral damage in pursuit of what they judge to be the greater good.
Season Two’s ambitions get much bigger and, frankly, less credible, aiming straight for the British government itself. As Rachel languishes in the mapping department, strange things start to occur to Security Secretary Isaac Turner (Paapa Essiedu). Deepfakes of his voice and image begin spreading damaging disinformation through various media, and he can only watch, incredulous, as his career and family life crumble.
Rachel puts two and two together and reaches out to Turner. But things get tricky when, like Faust, he meets the devil, in the form of a big-tech slimeball who wants to strike a bargain to turn the politician’s career around. He’s not called Turner for nothing!
The show is undeniably exciting and well paced, and the conclusion of Season Two probably lands better with audiences than the more ambiguous end of the first season. Grainger, Essiedu, and Season One’s Callum Turner stand out in a uniformly terrific cast. If you find yourself yelling at the screen when things get too far-fetched, you’re probably not alone. But, like me, you’ll be there for Season Three, trusting no one in the meantime.
Lisa Henricksson reviews mystery books at Air Mail. She lives in New York City
