Book Review: Second Shot by Cindy Dees

If you are addicted to female assassins “of a certain age,” like the characters in Deanna Raybourn’s Killers of a Certain Age, you’re the perfect audience for Second Shot—the debut thriller in Cindy Dees’ Helen Warwick series. 

Fifty-five-year-old Helen Warwick is as good as it gets at spy craft but that didn’t stop her masters from forcing her retirement. Ruefully, she sees it as an opportunity to foster better relationships between her and her three adult children. The secrecy of her career, the long stretches when she was away from home, all contributed to her estrangement from her family. On New Year’s Eve Helen heads to her son’s house in Georgetown. Peter has a live-in boyfriend, an art collection, a prestigious address, and a puppy. Helen is there to puppy-sit and start mending fences. She’s nervous but determined:

She’d missed far too much of all her children’s lives. But, at long last, this was her chance to make up for it in some small measure.

 

Retirement. Motherhood. She could do this.

 

She lifted the knocker and let it fall.

 

Liang—Li to the family—opened the door immediately. “Mrs. Warwick. So good of you to puppysit for us tonight.”

Peter and Li are clearly doing okay: The house is impeccably decorated—“a small Renoir pastel casually filled a wall beside the refrigerator.” Helen is entranced with her grand-puppy, Biscuit. Like grandparents everywhere, she ignores the boys’ advice and spoils little Biscuit while she watches Casablanca. Midnight arrives with a volley of loud pops that sound like gunfire to Helen, causing her to ruminate on PTSD and veterans. Suddenly, all hell breaks loose. No lights. Helen tries to convince herself it couldn’t be deliberate, seeing as how she’s out of the game. Still, she loads up on kitchen knives, just in case:

Deafening automatic weapon fire erupted all at once. With an almighty crash, the entire glass-walled back of the house exploded inward. Glass flew everywhere as gunfire raked the family room. 

 

Crap on a cracker.

 

Feathers filled the air as the sofa exploded. The glow of fireworks punctuated the attack, and wood and pieces of furniture flew every which way in the strobe-like flashes. Something hot and wickedly sharp sliced across her left arm with the neat precision of a scalpel. She knew that pain. She’d gotten winged by a bullet.

Crap on a cracker indeed. Muscle memory kicks in: Helen shelters little Biscuit’s body with her own, then hears someone in the kitchen. She stabs him, cuts his throat, and grabs his weapon—a Russian Ash-12.7 urban assault rifle. She hears two more shooters. It’s mayhem but Helen holds her own, all the while searching for her purse and pulling out an EDC X9 Wilson Combat handgun. When things calm down a bit, she calls the police, who tell her they’ve found three dead men and that that a fourth man fled through the alley. 

Helen’s brain goes into overdrive while she struggles with the reality of a hit squad coming after her. Why? Who? She’s retired, isn’t she? You might be thinking Helen Warwick is Superwoman, but she isn’t. She hasn’t kept up with her fitness regimen—why would she? She feels every ache and pulled muscle in the aftermath of the New Year’s Eve disaster, although she’s justifiably proud of saving Biscuit and the Renoir.

Cindy Dees surrounds Helen with a motley crew of characters: her family, who have no idea of her insanely competent skillset; Yosef Mizra, her longtime CIA handler; and Russian agents. The reader is made well aware aware of Helen’s loneliness as well as her determination. Aside from Yosef, there’s no one Helen can confide in and she’s acutely aware of how vulnerable she has made her family. 

You won’t want to stop reading Second Shot once you start. It’s heart-stopping, ironic, humorous, and entirely believable. Perhaps that’s because of Cindy Dees personal story: She’s a former US Air Force pilot and part-time spy who draws upon real-life experience to fuel her stories of life on the edge of danger. I can’t wait for the next Helen Warwick thriller.