Crowd-pleasing classic requires no baking

Kang Jiyoung’s Mrs. Shim is a Killer (Harper Perennial, 320 pages, $25), originally published in Korea in 2010, is absolutely delightful.

Shim Eunok, a 52-year-old widow and mother of two, is barely making ends meet. When the butcher shop at which she works closes unexpectedly, throwing her out of work, Mrs. Shim answers a help-wanted ad posted by the Smile Private Detective Agency. Much to her surprise, she’s hired on as a contract killer.

What a charming character is Mrs. Shim: soft-spoken and unassuming, but a wizard with a sharpened blade. She’s not cold-hearted, just coldly analytical: she needs money, and killing pays well.

The novel, beautifully translated by Paige Morris, isn’t exactly a comedy, but neither is it one of those dark, gloomy thrillers. In fact, it’s a lot of fun.

History is messy. On one hand, it offers uplifting stories of success, courage, human achievement, invention, ingenuity, compassion and kindness. Think of Dr. Jonas Salk and his development of the first successful polio vaccine. Or Viola Desmond, who asserted her civil rights against racial segregation in Nova Scotia.

On the other hand, history is also dark, ugly, mean-spirited and a catalogue of hardships, tragedy and brutality. Consider slavery, the Holocaust, the First and Second World Wars and residential schools — to list only a very few examples of the bloodshed, cruelty, death and depravity that has frequently defined history.

Anyone who has extensively studied history or read a history book knows that the past is complex and rarely black and white; that men and women, whether they are politicians, activists, businessmen, journalists, lawyers and judges, have their good and bad sides. Human perfection is elusive and there are few saints.

Most of us understand this except, it seems, U.S. President Donald Trump and his White House officials. They don’t like presentations of U.S. history, for example, that highlight slavery and the slaughter of Indigenous peoples, key elements of the American past for hundreds of years.