Mrs. Shim Is a Killer by Kang Jiyoung

First published in South Korea in 2010; published in translation by Harper Perennial on April 21, 2026

Mrs. Shim Is a Killer is only the second crime novel from South Korea that I can recall reading. The first, The Plotters, is notable for its strong characterizations and careful storytelling. Mrs. Shim Is a Killer adopts a lighter tone but is equally enjoyable, albeit for different reasons.

The novel is impressively constructed. Each chapter holds a delightful surprise. The chapters are linked together, but for most of the novel, each chapter introduces, and focuses upon, a new character. Each character comes with a unique backstory. Because the novel’s destination is never clear, the plot is unpredictable.

There is a farcical edge to Mrs. Shim Is a Killer, first noticeable when Mrs. Shim, with very little contemplation, agrees to become a contract killer in exchange for a bar of gold. Mrs. Shim (first name Eunok) is an ajumma, which roughly translates as middle-aged woman. She is 51 when the novel begins. She just lost her job at a butcher’s shop because the owner was arrested at a gambling den. Her husband owned his own butcher’s shop but he died after driving his car into a pub. Since her husband was nearly blind, the police decided that he committed suicide so Eunok received no insurance payout. She had to sell her husband’s shop to pay for damages to the pub.

Eunok is still caring for a son and daughter and doesn’t know how to cope with her financial woes. Because an ajumma cannot easily find employment, she doesn’t expect anything to come of the ad seeking an ajumma for a high-paying position at a detective agency.

Korean detective agencies do the usual investigations into cheating husbands, but the story suggests that a couple of agencies are willing to solve a client’s problems by eliminating their source. The Smile Private Detective Agency provides that service. The firm’s CEO, Park Taesang, was its star killer, but he wants to recruit someone new to take on that role. Eunok’s skill with knives, honed during her career as a butcher, makes her a perfect fit, if you don’t count the fact that she has no history of murdering people.

Kang Jiyoung’s decision to turn a middle-aged widow into a knife-wielding assassin was clearly made with tongue in cheek, but Kang makes it easy to suspend disbelief. In the universe created by the story — a universe in which an ajumma is such an unlikely person to hold any job that isn’t menial, much less the job of assassin — the job offer and Eunok’s easy acceptance of her new profession seems natural.

Until the novel nears its end, each chapter tells a new story, each as interesting as the last. Each chapter sheds a different light on the chapters that came before. One story is about a cop who sacrificed his relationship with a son who now wants him dead because he arrested the villain who his son believed to be his true father. Another is a variant of Cyrano de Bergerac, involving a man who took credit for writing a love letter that was actually written by someone else (the story ends with a murder). Other stories are equally offbeat. Kang’s ability to flesh out the primary story with engaging background tales assured that my interest never wavered.

Only as the story approaches its end does the focus return to Eunok. By that time, her son is an apprentice killer for a rival agency, although mother and son are hiding their professions from each other. At the same time, the rival CEOs of two detective agencies want to kill each other, a development that pits mother and son assassins against each other. At the same time, another novice ajumma killer (this one the wife of a cop) enters the story.

Readers may need a spreadsheet to keep track of all the characters and their relationships to each other. The novel often has the feel of a comedy of errors as characters take extreme actions to conceal the truth from each other. The story is entertaining precisely for that reason. The plot follows unexpected routes as it hops from character to character and it is wildly impossible to accept at face value. Nevertheless, the novel’s construction is so clever and the characters are so sympathetic that the unlikely story did not distract from the pleasure I took in following it to its unexpectedly happy and satisfying destination.

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