Review: With menopause in their rearview mirrors, these hitwomen are licensed to kill

The crime-fighters-but-make-them-older trend continues with Deanna Raybourn’s “Kills Well With Others.”

The sequel to “Killers of a Certain Age” could repurpose that title because the quartet of sixtyish hitwomen from “Certain” is back in “Kills Well With Others.” And, as they say in movie trailers, this time it’s personal. A colleague of theirs at their shadowy, quasi-governmental organization, the Museum — which doles out violent justice around the world — has been killed. And the four women — sensible Billie, prim Helen, brash Mary Alice and madcap Natalie — may be next on the hitlist.

Raybourn acquaints readers with the territory so breezily that you don’t need to have read “Certain” to appreciate the new book, whose four heroines share their creator’s cynicism and quick wit (Mary Alice, we learn, “always resembled a pinup, and now she looked like Marilyn Monroe if Marilyn had lived to her sixties and taken up knitting”). She also has fun with the 007-approved practice of having her protagonists pursue maniacs from one picturesque locale to another, from a swank cruise ship to an opera house in Venice to the Alps in Switzerland to a charmingly remote English village that has not yet been discovered by Rick Steves but has seemingly been overrun by freelance arsonists/murderers.

The globe-hopping is swell but it’s the time-jumping that hangs up “Kills Well With Others.” It’s set in the present but several interstitial chapters flash back to the ‘80s and ’90s, when the women were getting their start as ruthless-but-funny contract killers.

On their own, these chapters are as amusing as the rest of the book but they feel almost like stray short stories from a different sort of novel, one that Raybourn decided not to complete. Worse, the flashback stories break the momentum of the modern story and burden us with way too many incidental characters that it’s not worth trying to keep track of.

Eventually, the flashback scenes do connect to the present-day stuff. That’s when “Kills Well With Others” kicks back into gear. A comic thriller that’s funny and thrilling and spotlights four memorable heroines, you could say it’s a little like if the “Slow Horses” crew were in their sixties and took up knitting.

Kills Well With Others

By: Deanna Raybourn.

Publisher: Berkley, 356 pages, $29.