Mrs. Shim Is a Killer
by Kang Jiyoung
translated by Paige Aniyah Morris
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What It's About
Mrs. Shim, Eun-ok Shim, 51 years old, widowed, unemployed, with two teenagers at home and an empty fridge, is not the kind of woman anyone pays attention to. And that is exactly what makes her deadly.
When she answers a vague job ad for the Smile Detective Agency, she assumes it's a cleaning position. But the agency isn't interested in her housekeeping skills. They're interested in what she can do with a cleaver. Years spent working in a butcher shop, first for her late husband and then for someone else, have made her sure-handed, efficient, and completely invisible in plain sight. She's hired on the spot.
Mrs. Shim Is a Killer by Kang Jiyoung, translated by Paige Aniyah Morris, is a darkly comic Korean thriller that unfolds through a kaleidoscope of perspectives. Each chapter shifts focus to a different character, neighbors, colleagues, rivals, her own children, sketching in where they came from, what they want, and how they orbit around Mrs. Shim. Gradually, all of these threads pull toward a single reckoning.
Paige Aniyah Morris, whose translation credits include co-translating Han Kang's We Do Not Part (with e. yaewon), brings the same attentiveness to voice and register here, balancing the novel's dark absurdism with its quieter emotional undercurrents.
What Stuck With Me
The book conjures a whole world of people who exist at the margins, older women, the working poor, the invisibly struggling. Mrs. Shim isn't a glamorous assassin. She's an ajumma who makes kimchi for her neighbor with dementia by day and takes out contracts by night. Her competence is almost domestic in its efficiency, and that's the joke and the point at the same time.
The rotating point-of-view structure gives the novel a mosaic quality. At times it reminded me of The Man Who Died Seven Times, that sense of returning to the same axis of events from a different angle. You understand more each time, even as the emotional center keeps shifting. The effect is that you never quite settle into any one character long enough to feel the pull of their fate. You're always being moved along to the next person. So you're watching from the outside rather than feeling it from the inside.
What I thought about most was the question the book raises without ever stating it directly: why are there so many Korean thrillers built around middle-aged women who kill? The killers of The Plotters feel like a different genre entirely, younger, darker, more world-weary. But Mrs. Shim, the Old Lady with the Knife, the aging hitmen of Diary of a Murderer, there's something running through all of them about survival, invisibility, and what it means to reach a certain age in Korean society and still have to fight for your place in it. Kang Jiyoung, who has built much of her career around female assassins, seems to understand this territory instinctively.
My Takeaway
Mrs. Shim Is a Killer is a light, entertaining read with more going on beneath the surface than the premise suggests. Where Hornclaw in The Old Lady with the Knife is defined by loss, a woman with no one left reaching toward connection almost in spite of herself, Mrs. Shim kills because she's a mother. The violence is an extension of the same instinct as making kimchi, relentless and practical. That's what makes this the funnier book and also the lighter one. It won't unsettle you the way The Plotters does, but it's a worthwhile addition to Korean crime fiction for anyone drawn to dark humor over dread. Strange, funny, and a little more pointed than it looks, Mrs. Shim is worth meeting.
Mrs. Shim Is a Killer was originally published in Korean in 2023 as 심여사는 킬러. The English translation by Paige Aniyah Morris publishes April 21, 2026 from Harper Perennial.
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If You Liked This
If Mrs. Shim Is a Killer hit the spot, you might also enjoy:
The Old Lady with the Knifeby Gu Byeong-mo, another aging assassin navigating a world that has stopped seeing her
Diary of a Murdererby Kim Young-ha, which takes a similarly dark and wry look at a killer reckoning with the end of his career.
The Plotters by Um Tae-seob is essential Korean crime fiction.
All of these books can also be found on my storefront.
I received an advance reading copy of this book from the publisher - Harper Perennial - in exchange for an honest review. All opinions are my own.
