Three Books I'm Reading Now, 3/17/25 Edition

The Books I'm Reading Now

I'm reading the recently published Kills Well with Others, the newest novel in Deanna Raybourn's irresistible Killers of a Certain Age series about aging, sassy female assassins; I'm reading Karen Russell's recently published, intriguing magical-realism historical fiction set during the Dust Bowl, The Antidote; and I'm listening to Gillian McAllister's newest twisty, smart mystery, Famous Last Words.

What are you reading, bookworms?

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01 Kills Well with Others (Killers of a Certain Age #2) by Deanna Raybourn

The first installment of Deanna Raybourn's Killers of a Certain Age series was a fun, darkly funny, feminist story about a retiring female team of elite assassins. It was the right book at the right time for me: entertainment in the perfect combination of action and suspense, loyal friendship, clever plotting, and the promise of love.

Book two picks up as our main characters, having laid low for a year, are contacted by the Museum, the elite assassin organization they work for. An Eastern European gangster has obtained the names of agents who have stood in his way over the years, and our aging assassins seem likely to be next on his hit list. They must figure out who's turned traitor on the Museum--and stay alive long enough to bring them to justice.

I received a prepublication edition of this title, published March 11, courtesy of Berkley Publishing Group and NetGalley.

Raybourn is also the author of the wonderful Killers of a Certain Age, which was the first in the Killers of a Certain Age series.

And I loved A Curious Beginning, the first book in Deanna Raybourn's feisty Veronica Speedwell series of historical fiction mysteries, as well as the sequels A Perilous Undertaking, A Treacherous Curse, A Dangerous Collaboration, and A Murderous Relation. (There are currently nine books in the series.)

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02 The Antidote by Karen Russell

A terrible dust storm is raging through the fictional town of Uz, Nebraska, but the Great Depression and Dust Bowl are far from its only grave problems.

The Antidote tracks multiple characters to tell a story of caution, folly, and redemption: a Prairie Witch who holds others' memories and secrets, a Polish farmer who hoards his wheat, his orphan niece who is apprenticing under the Prairie Witch in between basketball sessions, a New Deal photographer, and a talking scarecrow.

I received a prepublication edition of The Antidote, published March 11, courtesy of Knopf and NetGalley.

Karen Russell is also the author of Swamplandia!

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03 Famous Last Words by Gillian McAllister

Famous Last Words is another smart, twisty mystery from Gillian McAllister.

Camilla is a new mother who has just dropped off her baby for her first day of daycare when the police arrive at her London office. It seems that her fun, carefree, ghostwriter of a husband is involved in a hostage situation--as the one wielding the gun.

Camilla, shocked, mostly cooperates with the police and the negotiator--until the hostages are shot and her husband escapes--then disappears. But in the ensuing years, Camilla can't stop obsessing over the unusual aspects of the siege: the violence is so out of character for Luke, the hostages are never identified, and Luke was behaving strangely beforehand and left her a cryptic note the morning of the horrifying events. Are the strange coordinates she's receiving on her phone after seven years a message from Luke? And can her love overcome her devastation at knowing that somehow her beloved partner became a coldhearted killer?

Gillian McAllister is also the author of Wrong Place, Wrong Time, a book I loved and not only listed in my Greedy Reading List Six More Time-Travel Stories to Explore, but included as one of my favorite books of the year when I read it.

I'm listening to an audiobook edition of Famous Last Words, published February 25, courtesy of HarperAudio and Libro.fm.