The Pale Horse, or Mark, as he now likes to be called, has been running the Assassin's Anonymous meetings since Kenji died. They meet in a basement of a decommissioned church which Mark purchased and fortunately wired with alarms to make sure of privacy. But something is amiss here. Astrid, a reformed assassin, has not shown up to the meetings in weeks, and her phone has been disconnected. As Mark begins the meeting, and after they review the 12 steps in the program, an alarm is tripped. Someone's at the door. A pizza guy shows up with a delivery-a large pizza covered in olives, and nobody orders olives on a pizza except Astrid-she's alive! Right after the delivery another alarm sounds-the members watch the screens and see that an invasion has begun. As Mark and Booker arm themselves and drop the others through the tunnel in the floor, they realize that whoever captured Astrid was tracking that delivery and were bent on killing all involved.
Meanwhile, Astrid is being held on an island somewhere and spends the first month in solitary under psychological torture. When finally released, she is introduced to an evil doctor bent on retrieving important information from her brain for some unknown client. Her fellow prisoners were all killers like Astrid was, before Mark introduced her to Assasins Anonymous, and were varying degrees of dangerous. Will she be able to leave this island before her brain gets donated to science and can Mark and Booker help her escape?
This is the sequel to Assassin's Anonymous, the novel I reviewed in June 2024. It is the guiltiest of guilty pleasures and I'm guilty of enjoying it. The idea of assassins wanting to stop killing people is interesting and thought-provoking, especially as their meeting parallels all those following Bill W. As Mark works his steps, we find he has managed to "stay clean" for 2 1/2 years but is always putting himself in the path of temptation to blow it all. He is now at the most difficult step, the notorious 8, that instructs him to make amends to those he hurt, and he will find that particularly hazardous as much will be asked of him. The book was less humorous than the first book, but it was certainly exciting...a worthy follow-up.
Reviewed by Donna Ballard
June 24, 2025
Reserve a physical copy - Coming soon
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