Tag: cozy adjacent

Adventure, Book of the Week

Book of the Week: Killers of a Certain Age

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I’m breaking the rules again with this week’s BotW a little bit, because I already flagged Killers of a Certain Age to you the day it came out. But I finally (because: shingles) finished it last week on holiday and now I want to write about it again! As I said in that post, this is Deanna Raybourn’s first contemporary adventure-thriller novel – although it does have some jumping back and forward in time in the way that her standalone novels do too.

To the plot: Billie and her three friends have spent their whole working lives working for the Museum – a network of assassins which was founded to hunt down escaped Nazis after World War Two, but has expanded its business into other people the world would be better without. To mark their retirement, the four women are sent on an all expenses paid cruise – but on day one, Billie spots a colleague from the organisation under cover, and realises that they are now the ones targetted for assassination. Thus begins their quest to stay alive – and to find out why their employer suddenly wants them dead.#

I was definitely expecting to be more nerve wracking than it ended up being – beause it’s actually a a charmingly murderous adventure caper, rather than a scary thriller type thing. I’ve been trying to explain what I mean, but the best that I can come up with is that it’s the cozy crime of adventure thrillers. Does that make sense? Billie, Mary Alice, Helen and Nathalie are a great gang to be following around for 300 pages and it makes such a change to see older women who are not just super competent, but super competant with modern technology and all that that entails. I liked the flashbacks to earlier in their career that explains how they became the women that they are today but I also liked the fact that they complain about their knees and that they’re not as young as they used to be. It felt very real and very relatable. I would say that I would like to be friends with them – except that I don’t think they do friends that aren’t assassins unless they want to kill you.

Killers of a Certain Age is an absolutely bargainous 99p on Kindle and Kobo at the moment – which is less than the pre-order price that I paid , so you really should go for it if you like cozy crime, or Steph Plum (and similar series) or Raybourn’s historical novels.

Happy Reading!

Book of the Week, Series I love

Book of the Week: Rush Jobs

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This week’s Book of the Week is more of  a series recommendation.  I read two Hobson and Choi books last week practically one after the other and  I was going to save my ravings for a Recommendsday post, but I didn’t anything I liked better last week, so it seemed churlish not to pick one of them for my BotW, so I chose Rush Jobs.

The Cover of Rush Jobs
I love the tube line theme to the covers for this.

The set up: John Hobson is a private detective with a Past.  Angelina Choi is his work experience intern.  In the first book, she starts her two week placement by tweeting that they’re going to solve a high profile murder case.  #HobsonvsWolf goes viral and soon Hobson has to try to solve a case he’s not being paid for and possibly face off against a giant wolf.  In Rush Jobs, we rejoin the duo at the start of Angelina’s second and final week of her work experience. And after all the online buzz from the last case, they’re in demand.  This leads to a lot of smaller crimes to solve (or not) along with some running story lines from the first book.  I can’t really say too much more about the plot because it gives away too much* but it’s a lot of fun.

I raced through this – and then immediately bought book three.  It’s dark and seedy but very funny which takes the edge off the grim bits.  Hobson is an intriguingly flawed character – we’ve found out a few bits about what he has going on in his past and it’s not pretty.  Choi is young and idealistic and although she has reasons of her own for taking an internship at a detective agency, she’s still quite innocent and some of the goings on in Hobson’s world are a bit of a shock to her.

I’ve mentioned cozy crime adjacent novels before – and this is another of them. Theses aren’t psychological thrillers, or gore-fests, or chillers and they have some things in common with classic detective stories of the Golden Age. But if you need your detectives to always do the “right” thing, the legal thing, to have no darkness in their pasts then maybe don’t read these. But if you like stories where things can’t be tied up neatly in a bow at the end and handed over to the police to unwrap and where your detective inhabits a slightly shaky middle ground between the law and the criminals then try this series.

I picked up the first book as an actual book from The Big Green Bookshop, but have read the other two on Kindle. I have book four lined up for my train journeys home from work this week. But do start at the beginning. It’ll make more sense that way.

Happy Reading!

*NB this is why I usually talk about first books in mystery series because you have more to say without ruining running storylines for people who haven’t already read the series!