Publication Date: April 21, 2026
When a middle-aged widowed loses her job at the butcher shop, she’s at a loss as to how to provide for her family—until she’s offered a position that puts her carving skills to new uses in this darkly humorous bestselling Korean thriller.
Mrs. Shim needs money. She’s lost her husband and her job, and she’s got three mouths to feed at her kitchen table. If she doesn’t find work soon, she and her children are going to lose their home.
So when she answers a vague job ad for the Smile Detective Agency, Mrs. Shim expects the job will be some kind of cleaning position. But when they only ask her questions about her experience as a butcher and what she can do with a cleaver, she begins to realize they want her to do a very different kind of cleaning—they want her to be an assassin. Too scared not to take them up on their offer, she agrees to the position.
And Mrs. Shim soon finds that her new job isn’t so different from her old one in the butcher shop, quickly becoming the agency’s best contract killer—but her rise to the top hasn’t gone unnoticed. Jealous of her talents, her agency’s competitors—and even her own colleagues– begin pointing fingers (and knives) in her direction.
If she wants to keep her job, her family, and her reputation intact, Mrs. Shim is going to have to take out the secretive leader of a rival agency. But when she has the chance to strike, she’s stunned to find a familiar face at the end of her blade.
As it turns out, this just may be one mess she can’t cut her way out of . . .
On the surface, Shim Eunok is a middle-aged widow with two children, looking for a job. The one thing she excels at is handling knives.
Told in first person by various characters, Mrs. Shim is a Killer proves to be an entertaining story from author Kang Jiyoung. There’s plenty of subtle dark humor woven into the storyline surrounding an unusual job offer.
Even without checking out the exchange rate of South Korean won bills to American dollars, becoming a “problem solver” offers an enticing opportunity. Mrs. Shim certainly doesn’t confess to her children what she’s actually doing at her new job.
The shift in narrators takes a bit of getting used to, with other characters rotating into the spotlight. Mrs. Shim soon finds trouble caused by a competitor, which leads to an interesting plot twist.
Mrs. Shim is a Killer offers a unique spin on a contract killer packaged in the form of a widow with a two-line resume.
Kang Jiyoung is a Korean writer based in Paju, near Seoul. Most of her fiction features female assassins. She is the author of the story collections Goodbye Paradise, Time for Dogs to Eat, and The Killer’s Shopping List, and her novels include Quarantine Station of New Culture, Elza’s Ha-yin, Circus in the Dark Forest, Frankenstein Family, Yawning is Delicious, Pheromone Boutique, and The Shop for Killers, which was adapted for television by Disney+.
