Robbie McNeil's hit list

Heath's inventive debut centers on a charming contract killer who gets pulled into a dangerous job. Robbie McNeil has settled down in a "worn-out" Indiana city, where she runs a karaoke bar with her best friend and roommate, Dee Machado. The two are also hired assassins; Robbie--who's been carrying out hits for 11 years to pay the bills--specializes in making her murders appear accidental. She dreams of staging an original musical, the expense of which leads her to accept a lucrative job offer despite her misgivings when the client provides scant details about the target. Robbie learns only that she's supposed to find and kill Xavier Landerman, which she soon discovers is a fake name. As she pulls at the thread of who Xavier might be and who might want him dead, she fears she may finally be in over her head. Wry prose ("Robbie McNeil did not kill a single person for the first eighteen years of her life. After that, available records weren't quite as clear") and a fair-play but hard-to-solve mystery make this sing. Admirers of Rob Hart's Assassins Anonymous will be impressed. Agent: Jenna Satterthwaite, Storm Literary. (Mar.)This review has been updated.

The partners in an Indiana karaoke bar who are "queerplatonic soulmates" double as hit men--sorry, hit persons. And that's only the opening premise of this criminal romp. Robin Ann McNeil has a rare combination of skills and limitations--she can read people a lot better than words or music, and she's utterly incurious--that made her a perfect choice for her mentor, James, to train and hire out as a contract killer specializing in meticulously faked accidents. Dee Machado, Robbie's "transmasc lesbian" housemate, partner, and friend, but not her lover, is a sniper who shares both her day and night gigs. Now that they're branching out still further by planning to stage a musical Robbie wrote and Dee will star in, James, who's stopped handling Robbie, emerges with a new client for her: Mr. Clark, who offers to pay her $20,000 if she kills the gambler Xavier Landerman, about whom he knows virtually nothing, within the month. Robbie's first job is to identify the target and track him down. Against all her instincts, she gets so interested in him that she keeps putting off the job, which turns out to be a big mistake. Meanwhile, James presses her to take on another contract against financier Kyle Lynch. The two jobs inevitably conflict with each other, with Robbie and Dee's day jobs, and with their musical, which runs into serious logistical problems of its own. Luckily, politically minded businessman Fletcher Ingram steps up to help finance the show--but is that such a lucky development after all? And how much sympathy will readers accord hired killers? Heath's brightly written debut ends with an extra treat: a Reading Group Guide whose questions are actually worth discussing. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.