GRANDMA GIL

She retired at sixty-five. Somebody forgot to tell the people who wanted her dead.

Katherine Gil bakes pecan cookies, staples tomato vines, and complains about the price of eggs. For forty-one years she was the Gray Widow, the name intelligence agencies said quietly. Then her husband’s brakes failed on a dry road, and the report closed in forty-eight hours.

When three armed men break into her Texas kitchen, she has one problem bigger than the gunmen: her eighteen-year-old granddaughter Emily is upstairs, and Emily has planned a summer in Europe.

From Rome to Vienna to Paris to a fortress carved into a Greek volcano, Katherine follows a dead man’s trail toward a plot against Saint Peter’s Square. Twenty-one contract killers follow her. Every one of them gets undone by the girl with the selfie stick, or so it seems.

Grandma Gil is a darkly comic spy thriller about grief, lies told out of love, and the rule one couple wrote on a napkin. Approx. 15,400 words. Also available in Mexican Spanish as La Abuela Gil.