Rob Hart – Three Hitmen and a Baby

Steve Thomas: Rob, welcome to the podcast.

Rob Hart: Thank you so much for having me. I really appreciate it.

Steve Thomas: For listeners who might be new to the series, what is the underlying concept of the Assassins Anonymous series, and then what’s the setup for this new book?

Rob Hart: Sure. It’s about a, basically a 12-step recovery program for killers. So in the first book, Assassins Anonymous, it follows Mark, who is widely considered to be one of the deadliest assassins in the world, who, hits a rock bottom, doesn’t wanna kill anymore, gets into the support program, and we meet all these other characters who are in this program.

And then the second book, we move the camera over to another character. Even though we’re getting a lot of Mark, we’re also getting a lot of another character. So the third book, Three Hitmen and a Baby… So basically there’s a member of the group who has a toddler, and she has to go do something, and she doesn’t wanna just leave the baby with a stranger, and Mark and two of the other members of the group are like, “Oh, let us take her. We’re three of the most capable people on the planet. We could take care of a kid.” And, spoiler alert, they’re not really suited to take care of a kid. Various things go sideways.

It was a fun one. All the books can be read separately. You don’t have to read them all to understand them, but at the same time, if you read the series, and I hope you do, ’cause I really wanna send my daughter to a nice college, I hope that they build on each other and you get some really fun connective tissue.

Steve Thomas: Yeah. You were on the podcast last year to talk about Medusa Protocol the second book, and you teased this book as saying, oh, it started as more of a romp, like just from the title where you’re like, “Oh, huh, that sounds like an action comedy thing.” But really, I think you said it was emotionally devastating by the time you got into it. At what point did you realize this wasn’t gonna just be a fun adventure and there was gonna be a lot more depth to it?

Rob Hart: I think about halfway through, and I’m glad that you remember that. That’s funny. ‘Cause it’s always such a weird thing about promoting a book, is that I’m now promoting the third one, but I’ve already turned in the fourth one. So sometimes it’s a matter of remembering what the hell I wrote in this one. But yeah, the first two have some really heavy themes, so for this one I was like, “I just wanna have some fun. I wanna reward people who are sticking with the series.” But then as I was getting deeper into it, I was like, “Oh no, we’re back to exploring some really deep emotions here. This is getting intense.”

I do think it’s the most fun out of the three books, but there’s still some, there’s still some heaviness there, ’cause it’s people who are dealing with mistakes that they’ve made that, that difference between who they perceive themselves as and who they want themselves to be. It’s not all sunshine and rainbows.

Steve Thomas: Yeah. Is it a struggle to manage those tonal shifts? Do you have to do anything special to, like when you’re organizing the book to make sure you’re not being too heavy on one side or the other without losing the momentum of the plot either ’cause you wanna keep everything going?

Rob Hart: I’ve been asked this question a lot lately, and I feel bad answering it because I wish I can say that it took more work, but I feel like the voice of this book and the voice of these characters come to me very naturally. And yeah, I want them to be, they can be very heavy and very deep, but they could also be very light and funny. And I like writing humor. I think there’s an importance in that in terms of connecting with the reader. ‘Cause when they can laugh with you, they trust you and they can really fall for these characters. At all times I’m just trying to have fun and entertain myself. That’s all I wanna do. I feel like if I can pull that off, it’s gonna be okay.

Steve Thomas: Yeah, absolutely. The book definitely just moves along, ’cause you wanna keep going. It’s not like there’s a huge cliffhanger at the end of every chapter, but it does definitely keep moving you along of “I gotta keep reading.”

Rob Hart: And that’s the key. That’s all I ever wanna do. The best kind of book is that book where you’re like, “I’m just gonna read a little bit more,” and then the next thing you know it’s 1:00 in the morning and you’re like, “Oh no.”

Steve Thomas: Yeah. That’s been me several nights reading this book. And it does have, I think, a, I guess cinematic might be a good way, like kind of you can really picture it in your head of what’s happening. Do you see it that way when you’re writing it? When you’re writing it, do you see like the action happening? Or like how does that process work for you?

Rob Hart: Yeah. I map it out. I spend a lot of time working on that. So in real life I do fight training. I trained in Krav Maga for years. I’m currently training in Muay Thai. And I’ve always had a deep appreciation for how the human body responds to intense ph- physical moments, the geography of a fight, like the spacing, all those little bits. I’m not like a professional fighter. I’ve never been in a ring, but I’ve certainly sparred and gotten beat up like pretty regularly when I go to train. So I like bringing that level of realism to it. I like that I can take my training and move it over to the writing space and see it paying off.

Steve Thomas: Yeah, and you do get the idea that you have mapped it out is the good way, ’cause they’re using things in the spaces sometimes, of I gotta just grab this, whatever’s next to me, and use it. But they’re knocking over a table there. But you had an idea that it’s a real space, ’cause sometimes in a fight scene you’re like reading as “What is going on? How big is this? Are they fighting in a warehouse? I don’t understand how big this is.” But I think you really got an idea sometimes of when you’re in a tight space, that the fights feel very real.

Rob Hart: Thank you. Thank you. I also, like I grew up on kung fu movies and action movies. I even took a class in college called Hong Kong Cinema, where we were watching like a ton of old school like, Iron Monkey and Fist of Legend, and a bunch of Jackie Chan’s old stuff. And every fight is a set piece. There are boundaries. There are things that are gonna affect the fight. So again, that’s just something that kind of comes naturally to me, ’cause I’m used to watching like a Jackie Chan fight where all of a sudden like, oh, there’s a ladder in the corner, and you’re just like, “Oh, that ladder’s gonna come into play pretty soon.” And then it does, and it’s awesome.

Steve Thomas: Early on there’s a fight in a construction area and what I liked is not only, like they use a tool, I won’t give away which tool that Mark uses against somebody. But I like the fact that when they first burst in there, that there’s just dust everywhere because it’s a construction site, so of course there’s dust everywhere, and it gets in both their eyes, and they’re trying to figure it out, and just makes that more real.

And obviously the fun tension of the book is that yes, these are highly trained assassins who are completely capable. They’re top of their field, but again, they completely fall apart when dealing with just normal everyday responsibilities like buying toothpaste, figuring out what streaming service is showing Bluey, they’re just flipping around. Is that contrast what the idea was in the first place for this book?

Rob Hart: Yeah, this idea really tickled me of, again, like these are such capable people who find themselves in a situation that they’re incapable to handle. I’m not a big fan of the hapless dad stereotype. I have a daughter, and I take pride in the fact I know how to cook for her. I know how to take care of her. I’m not useless.

But, these are characters who just have never been around kids. They’re not parents. They’re just again very capable, but caring for a kid there are things that you’re just not gonna know about and you’re not gonna know to do. And they’re missing out on that kind of prep period that you get. ‘Cause like, when you’re about to have a child, you’ve got nine months to prepare. And then you have the child and, for the first six months to a year, they’re basically just like a potato that screams and sleeps. Like they’re not really dangerous until they can move under their own power. That’s when it feels like you’re living with Leatherface all of a sudden and it’s like there’s just peril in every direction. It’s like when they can move, but you’ve had so much time to get ready for it. It’s a slow learning process, whereas they’re just getting thrown right into the deep end of the pool of this kid can walk and talk and communicate, ’cause I think in the book she’s two or three years old. And it’s okay, figure it out.

Steve Thomas: Yeah, and some of it’s even just everyday stuff that they, they don’t exist in the real world the rest of us walk around in. When the baby gets sick and they take her to the doctor, they don’t think about the fact that, oh, we don’t even know what her last name is, and we don’t know how to fill out paperwork, and what’s insurance? ‘Cause they just don’t exist in the world the rest of us do. They’re outside the law, I guess is the way of saying it.

Rob Hart: Yeah. Yeah. No and that was the thing is they all have fabricated identities. And the precipitating incident is the kid pops a really high fever, and they’re like, “Oh, no, we need help.” And then they get there, and they’re like, “Oh, no.” Cause that looks dicey. You show up with a kid. You don’t know the kid’s last name. You don’t even know what the kid’s technically legal name is because again, they’re in an anonymous program. They don’t know if Valencia is the mother’s name. There’s all these question marks, and then you’ve got the people who are working there who, completely justifiably, are like, ” this is weird. And there’s a kid involved. We need to intervene.” So it’s a very simple mistake to make, and that was the thing. I wanted it to be like a realistic mistake of they’re in a panic mode. They’re like, “Okay, we gotta take care of this kid. Uh-oh, We did this the wrong way.”

Steve Thomas: And meanwhile, Valencia’s on the other side of the country, and they’re trying to figure out “we need to tell her. She’s gonna kill us if we tell her,” but at some point we have to tell her, and that’s difficult on her too even though she’s missing from a chunk of the book that you know she’s having stress now because this is happening to her child, ’cause they do eventually tell her while she’s doing her own thing over there. She’s still in the story even if she’s not physically there for a lot of it.

Rob Hart: The one thing that bummed me out a little bit with this book, and I think my editor was ultimately right, but I actually in the middle of the book I had a big interlude chapter that was just Valencia and what she was doing and what was going on, and what she was processing in terms of all of this.

And my editor Daphne was like, “Ah, it kinda slows down the story a little bit,” but it was like an action scene. I thought it was fun and so I might make it an exclusive, like when people buy the book, if they show me the receipt or something I’ll send them the story so that they can see what I took out of the book. ‘Cause I think it would be fun to be able to share it with people. It was a good 10 or 15 pages that I had a blast writing.

Steve Thomas: Yeah when I was reading it I was wondering if it was gonna cut over to her, so yeah, it doesn’t feel necessary I guess, but it did feel like I was wondering what was going through her head.

Rob Hart: Yeah, and that’s the challenge because the book is dueling POV. It’s between Mark and Astrid, but then when you just have one entirely separate character just kinda crammed in the middle, things can get a little wavy.

Steve Thomas: The whole series is a lot about found family that these are dangerous people but they do care about each other.

Rob Hart: I’m a sucker for the found family stories. I need to sit down and do some research and think about this more fully. But I feel like the whole hero’s journey, the whole Joseph Campbell thing, I don’t know, man. Every one of those heroes, those solo heroes has people around him that is helping him accomplish his goal. Frodo doesn’t get to Mount Doom on his own. He’s got Samwise, and then he’s got the Fellowship backing him up from afar. That’s a found family narrative. That’s not a solo hero narrative. And that’s the thing that I like about fiction. It’s reminding us that we’re not alone and that there’s strength in numbers. So I’m always gonna skew toward writing those kinds of narratives.

And I love this little group. They’re just a fun bunch of goofball killers.

Steve Thomas: Yeah. And there’s a couple of the group that are off on a vacation together too that aren’t in the book, so you’ve got a lot of characters that you can play around with, and you can shift their POVs whenever you want to spice up the series.

Rob Hart: Oh, yeah, like I said, the fourth one is already in, and the fourth one actually does center very much on Mark. But, it’s this huge advantage of I’ve got this room full of people who all have their own histories and traumas and backgrounds. I could write 10 more of these probably. I need people to keep buying them for my publisher to agree that they’re worth paying for. But yeah, they’re so much fun.

Steve Thomas: And Mark in particular in this book is getting pulled back into his old life and mistakes that he made in the past that helped him get into recovery. Where do you see Mark’s path to recovery now? Especially during this book, he’s obviously having some extra issues with that. I guess you’re always in process, but how do you think he’s doing in his recovery?

Rob Hart: I think he’s doing pretty well. This is the challenge of writing a series character, is you want them to change, but they can’t change so much that there’s nothing else to explore. And when you’re in recovery, when you’re recovering from any kind of addiction, there’s no day that you’re magically recovered. You’re still an addict. You’re just, you’re in a place where you’re controlling it, like you’ve reached a place of Zen and serenity that you can live with it.

And for Mark, the first book was very much about his ego death, about him trying to dissuade himself of this notion that he could have it both ways, that he could be Mark and he could be the Pale Horse at the same time. The second one was him taking on the responsibility of running the home group and being a sponsor to somebody. So with the third book, he was in a really good place until this thing from his past kinda comes back. He ends up in a situation that’s very personal for him.

And so it’s like a big stress test, and it’s him thinking like, “You know what? Maybe I do have to give this up. Maybe the recovery thing isn’t for me because I can’t protect people otherwise.” So it’s trying to dig further and further into it. And then for the fourth book I think I found, and obviously I don’t wanna say too much about it. I don’t wanna like spoil the ending of the third book, but in the fourth book, Mark is in a completely different place. I will say this, he’s in Thailand. He’s in Bangkok. There’s a completely different aspect that we’re uncovering with him and that he’s exploring for himself.

Steve Thomas: And hopefully the other characters will be involved in the book as well, or is it gonna be pretty Mark-focused?

Rob Hart: It’s pretty Mark-focused, but I don’t wanna say much more than that.

Steve Thomas: Okay, that’s fine, but then, we’ll get to book five and we can get back to everybody else!

Rob Hart: That’s the hope. It’s actually the fourth book is the end of my contract with Putnam. They seem very happy, so we’re probably gonna go to them soon and be like, “Hey can we do more of these?” They might say, “You know what? The market’s not there for it, so we’re gonna hold off for a little bit.” Or, the movie might get fast-tracked, and then now I have to write 100 more of them! It’s a really weird place to be in. But I will say the fourth book ends in a place that could work as an ending for the series, but also if it were to keep going would springboard it into a sort of like new format, a new territory, which would be fun.

Steve Thomas: Okay. Cool. Yeah, I want it to keep going. I wanna get the Booker book someday.

Rob Hart: Actually, so the fourth book was almost from Booker’s POV. I got married in September, and me and my wife went to Thailand for our honeymoon and before I left for Thailand I spoke to my editor, and she’s “Yeah, let’s do a fourth book. Do you have any ideas?” And I’m like, “Ah, I’m kinda kicking around something. It’s not fully formed,” but it would’ve focused on Booker, and then I went to Thailand, and I was very strict. I was like, I’m not bringing my laptop. I’m not bringing anything. I’m not gonna work. For the first time in 10 years, I’m gonna go on a vacation. I’m not gonna do any work.

And within two days of being there, I was like, “Oh my God, I’ve got the entire fourth book in my head. I know exactly what to do.” And it springs very much from Bangkok’s culture and economy. And it’s amazing how quickly it came together, to the point where after swearing that I wasn’t gonna work, I was sitting in a noodle shop at midnight. And it’s raining like the Bible said it rained, and I’m sitting there tapping out a synopsis on my phone to just try to get it all down. And I, like, send it to my editor. I go to bed. I wake up in the morning, and I’ve got an email from her, and she’s like, “This is amazing. Please do this.” So gonna have to wait on the Booker book for a little bit because this one was just too good to pass up.

Steve Thomas: All right. We’ll forgive it for a good book. Booker is obviously one of the supporting characters and he has… I guess they all have their own similar trauma in that they all did the same things, killing people, but they’ve all reacted to it differently and have different manifestations of that trauma. Booker literally sees ghosts of the people that he killed. Can you talk about the sort of the religious aspect of him? ‘Cause he has a religious angle to him as well.

Rob Hart: Yeah. And I haven’t like really spelled that out. Like I kind of have it in my head. Like ’cause he generally like, yes, he’s a religious person. He’s a former mercenary. He tends to carry a pair of rosary beads with him. In my head, he was raised Catholic, and so he’s got a lot of that heaven and hell fear inside him that gets built into you when you’re raised in a religious setting. It’s been a fun thing to play with, that he says that he sees the ghosts of people that he killed following him around, and everyone in the group is respectful of it. They’re like, “Okay, we don’t necessarily believe in ghosts, but we believe you.”

So it’s like this fun thing in my head where it’s like I feel like the reader’s gotta be like, “I wonder if that’s real or not.” That’s part of the reason that I want to write a book with him at some point then just fully dive into that and really explore that. And then I get to you know, unpack my own religious trauma!

Steve Thomas: Yeah, ’cause they’re all haunted by their pasts in various ways. His is maybe a little more literal. And Astrid’s story in this one goes back into her past as well and a death that she feels responsible for, with a young girl, and that adds to the trauma of taking care of now this little girl in the book too ’cause she doesn’t feel like she doesn’t have that caregiver vibe to her. She’s clearly having a rockier road to recovery, I think, ’cause she’s already fallen off the wagon at least once. Where is she in this book?

Rob Hart: Astrid’s a fun character to write because, I like to say that Mark is very similar to my voice in the sense that Mark is a goofball and he’s very funny. But really Astrid is probably closer to my voice. She can be very short and frustrated and acerbic, but yeah, her road to recovery is definitely rockier, but she’s also been in it for a shorter amount of time. She’s the newest member. Not technically. Quraishi came on in the second book. But she’s still figuring out a lot of this stuff.

And so there are certain things, like Mark had that sort of like big ego death moment in the first book. Astrid kind of had it, but she’s still, there are things that, and again, I don’t want to get too far into spoilers, but as the book goes on, you can see that Astrid ends up in a position that is heavy, but it’s where she belongs as well. She’s not naturally a nurturing person, but she’s very good at it, and she doesn’t realize that. So it’s trying to bring her to that place of understanding that yes, people can rely on you, and it’s okay if people are relying on you.

Steve Thomas: Yeah, she doesn’t feel like she gets that anxiousness when she’s asked to take on Lucia, but she’s the one when Mark and Booker are doing the “What’s toothpaste for kids?”, that kind of stuff of where they don’t know how to do that stuff, she is the one that’s stepping in and doing a good job of taking care. So yeah, it’s just that sometimes you don’t recognize things in yourself.

Mark is separated from the group at various points, and I feel like as her sponsor, he might be there to help her out more, but maybe she’s not able to have that. I don’t know if that’s a good role for him or not?

Rob Hart: Yeah, no I think you’re exactly right. It’s fun watching her grow into … again, it’s like finding those growth points for these characters. I can’t fix them. If I fix them, I can’t write them about them anymore. But it’s fun watching them change with each book.

Steve Thomas: You continue to write your novels. Obviously you do a lot of collaborations, and you do some teaching, does that help you keep all your work and writing energized to keep jumping from thing to thing? Or is it like you always have a million tabs open on your browser?

Rob Hart: I try not to keep too many tabs open on my browser. I’m always, my wife keeps 10 million tabs open and then her computer slows down, and I’m like, “That’s why. Yeah, stop doing that.” But no I need multiple projects for a variety of reasons. One is that I don’t like being bored. The second I feel like I don’t have something to work on, I start spiraling into a pit of depression and despair. Not great. I also I do this full time, so I need to, continue to earn money to feed my family, and again, send my daughter to a good college.

But there’s also a million things I wanna do. I don’t have a deficit of ideas, I have a deficit of time. If I sat down, I could probably map out the next five to ten years maybe of projects that I wanna work on. And that’s exciting to me. It gives me something to look forward to. I’ve got stuff that’s in the process now that I’m like, man, I’m obsessed with and just I think about every day and try to come up with new ways to explore them. Like I’ve got a nonfiction proposal that we’re trying to sell, which would be amazing to do. It’s like all this stuff just keeps me going. It keeps me excited. The second I’m not excited, what’s the point?

Steve Thomas: You’ve done lots of collaborative books, so you obviously like working with other writers. We mentioned before Alex Segura who was just on the show recently talking about his Daredevil book. You guys did a book together. You did a short story with James Patterson, and lots of other people. When I was looking up your books the first time you were on the show last year, so many things came up with Rob Hart and this person, Rob Hart and this person. What do you like about that collaborative what’s different about that than just coming up with your own ideas?

Rob Hart: When you have the right person, it’s great ’cause then you’re just hanging out. Then you’re just like doing fun stuff, coming up with fun ideas, jamming on something together. When you collaborate with someone, the workload is technically a little bit lighter in the sense that you’ve got, multiple hands in the pot all of a sudden. Plus, another person will challenge you and point you in directions that you might not have come to yourself, which is really cool.

My latest collaboration was with Jeff Rake the showrunner and creator of the TV show Manifest, and we did a book called Detour which was a big sci-fi book, and that came out in January, and that was just super fun. Working with a guy who primarily works in TV, he thinks about story in a slightly different way and the way character and plot intertwine but he’s brilliant at it. I was learning so much from him just working on this together. And it’s a series. The second book will be out this coming January. And yeah, it’s just the absolute best. It’s so fun to just get a peek inside someone else’s brain.

Steve Thomas: Yeah. And like you said, you can bounce ideas off of them. When you’re writing yourself, you’re bouncing ideas off yourself. Sometimes it’ll be your editor or your wife or something like that but you don’t have another creative partner necessarily that you’re doing, but I do like that the mix of that sometimes. Just my work at the library, I prefer getting in a big brainstorming group and coming up with programs that we wanna do at the library so we can all have ideas coming in and everything. So I just love that interactive team energy there.

These characters have done, objectively terrible things in their past before.

Rob Hart: Yep.

Steve Thomas: Pretty huge things. What do you think makes readers willing to keep rooting for them and being really happy for them, I guess they’re not objectively terrible people now, but in their past they obviously have very terrible pasts?

Rob Hart: Yeah, the assassin and the hitman character is interesting because we as viewers and readers we tend to really like them because they’re in this moral gray area of, “they’re killing people, but they’re killing bad people so it’s okay.” And, the thing that I wanted to play with was this idea of, killing is still bad no matter what, we’re just automatically assuming the people they kill are bad when those people probably have families or someone whose life is harder now that they’re dead.

But honestly I think it’s just that, at the end of the day we all feel like we want to be better people and we want to know that we’re capable of change. That’s very much what I was struggling with when I first started writing the series. It came from this place of thinking like, okay, like I hit my 40s and I’m looking at my life and there are things that I’m really proud of and there are things that I’m not proud of, and I want to be a better person, I want it for myself, for my daughter for my family, and is that possible?

So I think that’s a question that we all contemplate and so we’re playing that out on a slightly fantastical scale with these characters of okay, well, if they can change maybe I can change too.

Steve Thomas: So you talked a little bit about the next book in the series and how you might consider going in the future. After three books already or four you’ve already written, is there anything about those characters that keep surprising you?

Rob Hart: That’s an interesting question. Yeah, there are always moments that pop up when I’m writing a book that’s like, “Oh, cool,” I didn’t think we were gonna get that deep. I’ve always got like a surface level up in my head of “this is the arc for this character, and this is like the kind of stuff that I wanna do,” and then sometimes halfway through I’ll be like, “oh wow, like, this is digging in much further than I necessarily thought it would.” But again, like every book for me is just a little form of therapy.

Steve Thomas: And it’s probably fun sometimes ’cause, you start with the funny little premise of this book of, oh, they’re all left with the baby and everything, and then you start to really think about how these characters would react to it, and you think, oh wait, I know Astrid in her past lost a young girl, so that would probably trigger things like that once you just shove a situation on a character and see how they react to it.

Rob Hart: You’re right. It’s like the premise seemed fun and then when I sat down with it, I’m like, oh wow, yeah, Astrid would, this would be really triggering for her. Oh my God, this is cool.

Steve Thomas: Yeah. And Mark obviously has a son from before, all kinds of things are gonna come up.

Well, Rob, thank you so much for coming on the podcast. I really enjoyed the book. I got my wife to read the first book, and she’s really excited, and I also put it on as my staff pick at the library pretty often because I enjoyed it very much. It’s one of those books that I really did rush through that I don’t rush through books that, that often usually, I’m usually a pretty slow reader, but very definitely good read, very easy read, but definitely some heavy subjects in this one.

Rob Hart: I appreciate that so much. Thank you.

Steve Thomas: Thanks, Rob.

*****

April Mazza: Hello, and welcome back to The Circ Desk. I’m April Mazza, a NoveList librarian. I work on professional development courses for Learn with NoveList, and I love any chance to talk about books.

Lindsey Dunn: And I’m Lindsey Dunn, a senior readers’ advisory librarian at NoveList who works on genre guides and Learn with NoveList courses, and I love to understand what makes readers pick up a book. We’ve just finished listening to Steve talk with author Rob Hart, so we want to share some readalike options for Three Hit Men and a Baby, which of course made me think of the 1987 film, Three Men and a Baby.

April, do you want to kick things off and share your two readalikes?

April Mazza: Yes. It’s a nice nod to the classic ’80s comedy, definitely part of my formative years growing up, but I think it sets the expectation for the readers, right, that there is going to be some humor in this thriller.

And that’s why right away I thought about Killing Me by Michelle Gagnon, which was published in 2023, but was one of my favorite reads just a few months ago I think. It’s about Amber, a college student with a grifter past who’s trying to turn her life around when she narrowly escapes a serial killer, so instead of focusing on school, she’s focused on keeping her past a secret and not dying. Usually I am drawn to a book by the plot, so that definitely intrigued me, but I love to love the characters. Amber’s kind of a hot mess. She’s flawed and scrappy, and I just couldn’t help rooting for her and her found family that she discovers while hiding out in a Las Vegas motel. I always like a little humor with my darkness, and that’s something this book shares with Rob Hart’s Assassins Anonymous series. So I think if you’re looking for something fast-paced, suspenseful, darkly humorous, and also part of a series, you might want to try Killing Me.

Lindsey Dunn: I think we need to add two words in here, April, which is “Pikachu Killer.” April didn’t even mention that the serial killer that she escapes is obsessed with Pokemon. Seems like it’s going to be a very fun time.

April Mazza: Yes, it was really fun, and it added to the humor of the book. It’s kind of over the top, but still suspenseful.

So for my other pick, I was still thinking of thrillers that blend humor and suspense, but I wanted to see what else was out there from the point of view of a reluctant assassin. And I hit gold with Mrs. Shim is a Killer by Kang Jiyoung. This is a Korean story translated into English that just came out in April of this year.

So in NoveList Plus, when I was looking at the record for Three Hit Men and a Baby, there’s a section for every title where you can mix and match elements, and it’s really fun to play around with. And in this case, I chose offbeat because that’s the kind of humor I like, and assassin, just to see what would come up. And I was sold on Mrs. Shim once I read the description and reviews, which are also right there in NoveList.

So Mrs. Shim is a widow who’s just lost her job at a butcher shop. Like our other main characters, she also has secrets to hide, but more importantly, she has a family to feed. Desperate for any job, she answers a vague ad for a detective agency where it turns out she can use her knife skills as an assassin. And as an older woman, Mrs. Shim is almost invisible in society, and that actually becomes her greatest strength as a killer. But it also draws unwanted attention and even more danger. Compared to the other books, it’s a little more disturbing and incisive, but I think it will really appeal to anyone who, like I said, wants to read the assassin’s point of view.

And another interesting thread that I think connects all three, besides the suspense and dark humor, is that these characters just want simple, normal lives, but are pulled into dangerous situations, which I think is fun to read about because most of us just have simple, ordinary, normal lives.

How about you, Lindsay?

Lindsey Dunn: It’s very true. The thing that grabbed my attention right away about Three Hitmen and a Baby is that even though it’s a thriller, it’s also got a sense of humor and has appeals like action-packed, witty, and offbeat. So it’s gonna be fun and keep us on our toes. And I was thinking of the Fast and Furious films and how the group does all of these heists, but they also raise kids and have family cookouts. It’s very suburban. So when I was searching for read-alikes, I tried using the appeals I mentioned to mix and match, like witty, offbeat, and action-packed, even if they weren’t thrillers. I even tried adding in chosen family as a theme, but that didn’t end up finding the kind of books I wanted. I ended up finding my first book with one of my favorite NoveList tricks: the RV search. This allows you to find a word that might be in reviews, hence the abbreviation RV. The word I looked for was heist.

The book I found is Rules for Aging and Larceny by Julia London. This is a new release. It’s about four elderly women who used to be a gang of thieves. They only stole from those who deserved it, of course. Time and conflict drove them apart. Now they reunite to get revenge on a man who tricked one of their granddaughters out of their life savings. This was an automatic yes as soon as I saw it. I could just picture these four women getting the band back together. They’ve settled down, but maybe domestic life feels a little dull. I’m thinking Ocean’s 11, but starring the Golden Girls. It has that same combo of people with a past with relatable situations, like seeing your granddaughter get taken advantage of and wanting to help them. This is definitely a great fit for readers looking for a fun caper adventure with witty wisecracks and a group of true blue friends you can root for.

April Mazza: So I think not only did I just learn a new NoveList trick myself, but I have another book to add to my TBR because that sounds amazing. And I think it’s interesting you bring up movies and TV series that these books made you think of because sometimes when I’m reading, especially a fast-paced story, I’ll think, “This would make a great movie.” And I would love to see the Assassins Anonymous series on screen.

Lindsey Dunn: I think actually all the books we’re picking sound like they could make amazing movies.

My second book is Somebody Worth Killing by Jessica Payne. I found this one by looking for thrillers mixed with darkly humorous and a keyword of babysitter. We are turning now from an ensemble cast to the POV of one character. This is a book about Nadia, a mom, wife, and event planner who really needs to find a good babysitter. She also happens to be an assassin, but she considers this a form of therapy since she has psychopathic tendencies and knows that her targets are bad guys who deserve what they’ve got coming. Nadia finds out that due to her role as a mom, she’s only been getting the boring assignments. Tired of being passed over and sidelined, she demands a big hit. But she doesn’t count on getting an assignment to kill her own husband, the king of all dad jokes. What could he have done to get him on her hit list? Nadia is going to find out. This goes back to the trope of Mr. & Mrs. Smith, or the secret lives of suburban couples, or if you like the film Black Bag, which came out last year. And this is perfect for anyone who’s ever been convinced there’s something funny going on with the next-door neighbor. This is less action-packed and more suspenseful with some elements of mystery as she tries to unlock why her dear sweet husband is on a kill list. Just a normal day in the neighborhood.

April Mazza: That sounds amazing. Another one to add to my ever-growing reading list.

Lindsey Dunn: Well, that’s it from us today at the Circ Desk. We’ll check you out next time!