Gayle Lynds

Gayle Lynds's new novel is The Assassins.

From her Between the Lines Interview with Anthony Franze:

THE ASSASSINS. Wow. I couldn’t put it down. As I said, the novel is part suspenseful heist story, part edge-of-your-seat espionage thriller, and part battle of wits among six professional killers. What inspired the tale?

Thank you for your kind words, Anthony. I like the way you encapsulate THE ASSASSINS. I love adventure and geopolitics, and as a result I’ve been writing for years about spies. This time, I wanted an equal amount of focus on a critical footnote—professional international assassins.

Your six assassins—the aging de facto leader Burleigh Morgan, the Basque, the Russian, the former jihadist, the retired Mossad operative, and the Cosa Nostra killer—are all master killers. They’re also very different people, bucking the common movie stereotype of assassins as one-dimensional killers. How did this interesting diversity of character come about?

Assassins fascinate me. For many of them, it’s simply a business, while others are driven by ideology. The truly insane don’t last decades, as these men have. It seemed to me their characters could be the basis for a compelling story. As it turns out, the six in my book work together only once, and that’s for Saddam Hussein. Then Saddam...[read on]

Visit Gayle Lynds's website.

--Marshal Zeringue