67 pages • 2 hours read
Deanna RaybournKillers of a Certain Age
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2022A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Summary
Background
Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Character Analysis
Themes
Symbols & Motifs
Important Quotes
Essay Topics
Tools
BetaChapters 21-24Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 21 Summary
The flashback opens in Rome in the spring of 1980. Mary Alice and Billie are alone in a Roman apartment, putting poison Billie smuggled through security into fruit cakes that also contain American whiskey. Their mission handler is Paar, whom the reader already knows the women have targeted for assassination as part of their attempt to save their lives. The poison is so deadly Billie and Mary Alice work in gas masks. After they conceal the ingredients and remove any evidence of their presence, the mission begins.
The women are dressed as nuns in full habits while Paar poses as a priest. The narrator indicates that this sensitive mission is a kind of reward for the success of their first job. Paar is along as a supervisor, which the women do not want, but he is cheerfully regaling them with his plans to visit a Swiss spa after the assassination. They arrive at St. Peter’s Basilica and find their target, an American bishop named Sullivan, emerging on his usual schedule.
They invent a religious order and tell him they insist on sharing the fruitcakes they have brought with them from Tennessee. Billie convinces him to sample the cake in their presence. He tells them he will certainly eat them all, and they leave. The narrator goes on to say that he is soon admitted to the hospital with no one suspecting a rare poison. A doctor is bribed to say that he died of cancer. As a result, his money laundering operation ends, and a new democracy emerges in Southeast Asia.
Chapter 22 Summary
Back in the present, the four friends, along with Minka and Akiko, are setting up their new headquarters. Helen makes a massive list, using markers from a discount store to write their assassination plans. Billie recalls her own impressions and the reactions of the others: “[T]he entire plan was there in shimmering hot pink. ‘It looks like a My Little Pony murder plot,’ Mary Alice said” (208). The women stay up all night planning, and Helen expresses happiness to be back at Benscombe.
The four decide to target Paar on his annual trip to a Swiss health spa, and Billie ensures she will take the job instead of Helen. The plan is to poison him with nicotine, which is toxic to the skin. Helen has difficulty booking the necessary rooms at the spa, so Billie enlists Minka’s help. Using social media, they find that a young woman, Debbi Williams, has her bachelorette party planned there. Billie calls and pretends the wedding is canceled, telling the clerk a false story of her fiancé abandoning her and weeping until he agrees to refund her money. Helen then books the rooms under an aristocratic alias.
Chapter 23 Summary
The narrative resumes two days later with Billie and the others pouring the poison into empty containers that will appear to be toiletries and other travel necessities. Then, they travel to Switzerland and assume their new disguises as elderly upper-class Englishwomen. At the spa’s check-in desk, Natalie distracts the clerk long enough to find Paar’s room number so they can guarantee he will arrive for a complimentary spa treatment.
Chapter 24 Summary
Dressed as spa employees, Billie and Mary Alice meet Paar and begin their poisonous spa treatment. Paar, realizing the trap they have sprung, blames Vance. Billie realizes the poison is acting slowly, so she strangles Paar after losing a game of rock paper scissors. They conceal the evidence, and Billie makes it appear that Paar choked on an apple. They arrive downstairs, and Helen declares their room unsatisfactory, just in time to return it to the woman whose reservation they stole. With the mission complete, they return to England to plan their next mission.
Chapters 21-24 Analysis
Raybourn uses the women’s first present-day mission and flashbacks to highlight their ingenuity and continued willingness to exploit gender stereotypes to achieve success. In their youth, the women were able to charm a corrupt bishop with Paar along only because the Museum did not trust their competence without a male chaperone. They manipulate the stereotypes of harmless nuns and domestic workers to successfully assassinate a bishop with a poisoned cake. This implies that women’s work has many layers and more consequences than is typically assumed, which Raybourn highlights when she says that the bishop’s death brought about regime change in an entire region.
In the present, the friends continue to use their femininity as strategy. Helen crafts their plans in bright pink marker while Billie pretends to be a hysterical bride to get them in position for the assassination. Once in Switzerland, they play up their age and respectability, making themselves memorable by what they represent while concealing who they really are.
In both the present and the past, Billie and her friends are remarkably calm and even jocular about the task ahead as Natalie focuses on the color of the markers, not the content of Helen’s to-do-list. Mary Alice and Billie leave who kills Paar up to a game of chance, rock paper scissors, which is typically played by children. At this stage of the women’s lives, assassination is a task like any other, which they coolly regard as a moral necessity. The alternative, Raybourn implies, would be to accept men’s decisions to control and direct their lives by acquiescing to their deaths. Their past relationship with Paar reminds the reader that the women’s careers shape how they act in the present—an issue that becomes more pressing as they continue their quest.
