Ex-hitman’s rehabilitation marred by near-killing

It can be exhausting being number one. Just ask Mark, the best assassin in the world. He’s done. He wants out. He’s joined a 12-step program for hitmen, and it’s been going decently well until, after a meeting, he narrowly escapes being murdered.

What to do? On the one hand, Mark really wants to make a go of this turning-his-life-around thing. On the other hand: somebody just tried to kill him, and no assassin with even a shred of self-respect can let that go unanswered.

Assassins Anonymous (Putnam, 336 pages, $26), by the spectacularly talented Rob Hart (The Warehouse, The Paradox Hotel), is an entertaining, surprising and just-plain-different thriller. We believe Mark when he says he wants to give up killing for money but, at the same time, we can sense there are dark things lurking inside him, things he doesn’t want to let us see. Things he doesn’t want to let out — but he might have to, if he wants to stay alive. Another winner from this very interesting writer.

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October, 1962. The Cuban Missile Crisis: for 13 days, the world lived under the threat of nuclear holocaust.

In his new novel The Shadow of War: A Novel of the Cuban Missile Crisis (St. Martin’s Griffin, 368 pages, $27) Jeff Shaara brings this moment in history to life by focusing not just on the key players (John F. Kennedy, Nikita Khrushchev, Fidel Castro), but on a variety of characters, real and fictional, in the U.S., the Soviet Union and Cuba.

All of this has been written about before. Why should you read this new take on the old story? Because this isn’t a history book; it’s a novel. Its real people are rendered in the kind of precise detail that you don’t usually find in a work of non-fiction, and the addition of fictional characters allows Shaara to dramatize events in a way that a traditional work of history cannot. We don’t merely read about the Cuban Missile Crisis here; we live it.

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Mallory Atkinson is a modern-day homicide cop who got bumped back in time to 1869 Scotland, where she woke up in the body of Catriona Mitchell, a housemaid. That happened (more plausibly than you might expect) in Kelley Armstrong’s novel A Rip Through Time, the first instalment of this rather terrific series.

In Death at a Highland Wedding (Minotaur, 336 pages, $26), the fourth book, Mallory is still stranded in Victorian Scotland, and she’s still using her 21st-century investigative skills to help Hugh McCreadie and Duncan Gray (a detective and a medical examiner, respectively) solve crimes.

This time, the crime is murder: no surprise there. But an interesting complication: there’s some confusion over whether the dead man was actually the intended victim.

The mystery is well handled but, as usual, the big selling point is the story’s setting: a historical environment so authentically realized that you’ll feel like you’re visiting the place.

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Here comes Cotton Malone, for the former U.S. Department of Justice operative, hot on the trail of the Black Eagle Trust, a top-secret cache of Second World War gold the American government uses to fund black ops around the world.

The latest novel in Steve Berry’s long-running series, The Atlas Maneuver (Grand Central, 480 pages, $14), is another fast-paced, twisty-turny adventure that mixes modern-day intrigue and historical mystery — the modern-day intrigue in this case being a global cryptocurrency conspiracy being orchestrated by some seriously bad people. (The Black Eagle Trust is, supposedly, a real thing.)

Cotton Malone is such a great character: short-tempered, fractious, downright unpleasant at times — but also smart as a whip, with a delicious sense of humour and a don’t-mess-with-me-attitude that makes him a dangerous opponent.

If you’ve never met him, now’s a good time. Just stay out of his way.

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Halifax freelancer David Pitt’s column appears the first weekend of every month. You can follow him on Bluesky at @bookman.bsky.social.