Woman resorts to hit jobs to make ends meet

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.

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Celebrity biographies come in many different styles: the quickies dashed off by a writer-for-hire to capitalize on a celebrity’s death; the heavily researched, earnestly respectful, ploddingly dull hagiographies; the bios designed to trash a person’s life and reputation.

And then you have something like Gandolfini: Jim, Tony, and the Life of a Legend (Abrams Press, 352 pages, $25), by film critic and historian Jason Bailey.

The HBO series The Sopranos made James Gandolfini (1961-2013) a superstar, but this isn’t a book about the show or about Tony Soprano; it’s about the man who brought Tony, and a host of other characters, to life. It’s about Gandolfini’s approach to acting and his approach to life, about a regular guy who didn’t seek out fame, but who dealt with it as best he could.

Bailey clearly has immense respect and admiration for Gandolfini but, equally, he isn’t blind to the actor’s flaws.

This is perhaps the most balanced, comprehensive biography of the man we’re ever likely to see — a triumph.

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It’s hard to imagine how a language could just disappear. But it happened: cuneiform, a written language that recorded Mesopotamian history on clay tablets for three millennia, vanished with the development of papyrus. And it stayed vanished for another couple of millennia until the mid-1800s, when a trio of men undertook one of the greatest challenges of the modern age — to resurrect the dead language and bring back into the light the ancient history of mankind.

The Mesoptamian Riddle: An Archaeologist, A Soldier, a Clergyman, and the Race to Decipher the World’s Oldest Writing (Simon & Schuster, 400 pages, $28), by Joshua Hammer, is the best kind of historical non-fiction. It’s got a lively cast of characters, a spellbinding story and it anchors the reader in a vividly drawn place and time (but without ever feeling like the author is saying “hey, look at all the research I did”). It’s more exciting, and more satisfying, than a lot of history-based thrillers.

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It’s Not What You Think (HarperCollins, 400 pages, $26), the latest psychological thriller from the masterful Clare Mackintosh, begins in tragedy. Nadeeka’s husband, Jamie, has been murdered, stabbed to death. As the police investigate, they begin to understand Jamie might not have been the man he claimed to have been, and Nadeeka is faced with the possibility that her life has been a lie.

Mackintosh is a deceptive, manipulative storyteller. That’s not a criticism: she has a gift for leading the reader in one direction, then shifting course unexpectedly, blindsiding us with a right-angle turn that throws everything we thought we knew into doubt.

Everyone is suspect, and anyone could be hiding something that will fundamentally change the texture of the story. A real page-turner.

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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.