Themes Kills Well with Others Deanna Raybourn

Art and Legacy in Killers of a Certain Age

Deanna Raybourn’s Killers of a Certain Age weaves a thriller around four retired assassins, but its deepest current runs through the theme of art and legacy. The plot pivots on a stolen Raphael painting, Leda and the Swan, looted by Nazis and hidden for decades. Yet the novel does not treat art as a mere MacGuffin. It uses the painting—and the women’s relationship to it—to ask: What do we choose to preserve, and what does that choice say about who we are? The book’s central claim is that legacy is not an object you leave behind, but an act of creation that continues even in destruction. The women of Project Sphinx are killers, but they are also custodians—of cultural heritage, of each other, and of their own stories.

The Stolen Raphael: A Legacy of Theft and Redemption

The novel traces the journey of Leda and the Swan across three distinct plot phases, each revealing a different facet of legacy.

Phase One: The Cache in the Cave (1994). In Chapter Twenty-Two, the team learns of Albrecht Danner, a Nazi industrialist who stole artworks from Jewish families and hid them in Egypt’s Valley of the Kings. His grandson Fermín Bosque retrieves the hoard to sell. Billie, Helen, Mary Alice, and Natalie are sent to kill Bosque and recover the art. During the mission in Egypt, Billie stabs Bosque with a cheap Tutankhamun souvenir knife and secures the cache. Yet Leda is missing—Bosque had already moved it. The women leave the other works for repatriation, but the missing Raphael symbolizes a legacy interrupted: the painting’s journey from rightful owner to Nazi bunker to Egyptian cave remains unfinished. The Museum’s work is never complete.

Phase Two: The White Whale Resurfaces (2025). Decades later, the painting reappears in Montenegro with a gangster named Jovan Murić. The women discover that a mole in the Museum gave Galina Lazarov the information to steal it. In Chapter Twenty-Seven, Helen calls Leda “our white whale”—the one that got away. The recovery mission becomes personal: not just to kill Galina, but to close the circle on a legacy that has haunted them. When they finally retrieve the painting from Marilyn Carstairs on a train and hand it over for repatriation, they are not just returning art; they are repairing the damage of history. The painting’s return is a act of cultural restoration, but it also restores the women’s sense of purpose.

Phase Three: The Shepherdess of the Sphinxes (Venice, 2025). In the final chapter, the four women visit the Peggy Guggenheim Collection. They stand before Leonor Fini’s Shepherdess of the Sphinxes and toast themselves as “necessary monsters.” This moment transforms their identity: they are no longer just killers but interpreters of the world’s darker realities. The painting they view is not looted but freely given—a small, personal legacy of a surrealist artist. By choosing to see themselves in that canvas, the women claim their own place in art’s long conversation about power and survival.

Character Connections: Crafting Personal Legacies

Each of the four women interacts with art and legacy differently, reflecting her own history.

  • Billie Webster is the pragmatist. She kills Bosque without hesitation, but she also recognizes the value of the paintings. Her relationship with Taverner—a man who accepts her need for purpose—hints at a personal legacy built on love rather than violence. At the end, she rides away with him, closing the loop begun on a Greek island.

  • Helen is the archivist. She keeps the team together, remembers the codes, and ultimately hints at a relationship with Naomi, the Museum’s new contact. Her legacy is the institutional memory of Project Sphinx.

  • Natalie Schuyler is the artist. In Chapter Twenty-Two, she reacts viscerally to the slide of the warehouse of looted goods because her grandmother died in the Dutch Resistance. Art for Nat is personal history. She later becomes the one who most treasures the recovered works.

  • Mary Alice Tuttle is the moral anchor. She jokes about Nazis but never forgets the human cost. Her legacy is domestic—a husband and cats—but also the satisfaction of a job well done.

The obsidian wolf (a symbol from earlier in the book) represents the predatory nature the women must embrace. They are not passive inheritors of legacy; they actively hunt it down.

Complexity and Contradiction

The novel refuses a simple “art is good, theft is bad” message. Consider:

  • The Museum itself was founded to hunt Nazis, but its own legacy is tarnished by moles like Marilyn Carstairs, who sells information for personal gain. Even the “good guys” are compromised.

  • The women kill to recover art, yet they are assassins. The Leda painting depicts a mythological rape; its beauty coexists with a brutal subject. The book does not shy from this tension.

  • In the end, they return the painting to its rightful heirs, but they also accept bonuses and pensions. Their legacy is both heroic and mercenary.

Raybourn uses the Author’s Note to remind readers that “authors are liars”—just as the Museum’s provenance records can be faked. Legacy, the novel suggests, is always a narrative we construct, and we must choose which stories to believe.

Study Questions and Answers

1. In what ways does the missing Raphael Leda and the Swan function as a symbol of unfinished legacy throughout the novel?
The painting’s absence drives two missions decades apart. It represents the failure to fully close the book on Nazi looted art, and it mirrors the women’s own unfinished business—both with the Museum and with their personal lives.

2. How does the setting of the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in the final chapter reframe the women’s identity?
By viewing Shepherdess of the Sphinxes and toasting themselves as “necessary monsters,” they claim membership in the surrealist tradition of embracing contradiction. They are not just killers but artists of their own fate.

3. Compare the treatment of art in the Bosque mission (1994) and the Lazarov mission (2025). What changes?
In the first mission, the women recover art but miss the Raphael. In the second, they finally retrieve it. The shift reflects a move from professional duty to personal redemption—the painting becomes a measure of their own legacy.

4. Why does the novel include a detailed description of the Leda painting’s provenance, from Raphael to Francis I to a Jewish collector to a Nazi?
The provenance establishes art as a living record of human history—both beautiful and violent. It shows that legacy is not static: each owner adds a layer, and the women’s act of return is another such layer.

5. What does the “obsidian wolf” symbol have to do with the theme of legacy?
The wolf represents the necessary violence the women must embody to preserve culture. Their legacy is not just the art they save but the predator instinct they pass on—one that cannot be domesticated, only understood.