THE MEDUSA PROTOCOL by Rob Hart – Review

I received this book for free from the Publisher in exchange for an honest review. This does not affect my opinion of the book or the content of my review.

The Medusa Protocol by Rob Hart
Series: Assassins Anonymous #2
Published by G.P. Putnam's Sons on June 24 2025
Genres: Adult, Thriller
Pages: 320
Format: eARC
Source: Publisher
Buy on Amazon
Goodreads

The nitty-gritty: Unexpected twists and laugh-out-loud humor make this assassins-turned-good guys story an excellent sequel.

“’Yo, snakes are attracted to sound,’ Booker says.

‘You a herpetologist now?’ I ask.

‘No, but remember that episode of The Simpsons where Lisa used stereo speakers to attract the snakes?’

‘Okay, you are not a herpetologist. We don’t make scientific decisions based on a twenty-year-old cartoon.’”

This review is spoiler free for both Assassins Anonymous and The Medusa Protocol.

Assassins Anonymous made my top five books of 2024, so The Medusa Protocol obviously had a lot to live up to. And it was an excellent follow-up, although it didn’t quite have the emotional impact of the first book, which is why I’m rating it slightly lower. If you aren’t reading this series, I urge you to try it and I guarantee you’ll have a rollicking good time! The books are fairly short with lean writing (not a single wasted word), incredibly funny dialogue, and characters you’ll fall in love with—even the bad guys. 

To set the stage, the story is about a group of ex-assassins who have, for various reasons, decided to quit killing people, and they have started an AA group—Assassins Anonymous—to support each other. The last book focused on Mark and was told exclusively from his point of view. This time we get alternating chapters from another ex-assassin, Astrid, also known as Azrael when she was in the business. When the story opens, Astrid has been “sober” for six months with Mark as her sponsor, but one day she stops showing up to the AA meetings. Mark is worried and assumes one of two things: she’s either decided to go back to killing, or her lifestyle has caught up with her and she’s dead.

It turns out neither is true. One day during a meeting, Mark and his ex-assassin friends get an undeniable message that Astrid is still alive—and she’s trying to communicate with them. At the same time, the church they’re meeting at, which Mark has rigged to alert them of intruders, is invaded by a black ops team. Mark and his fellow AA friends—Booker, Ms. Nguyen and Valencia and her three week old baby Lucia—suddenly find themselves fighting for their lives and trying not to kill anyone in the process. Is the strike connected to Astrid’s disappearance? Mark is determined to find his sponsee no matter what—as long as he can stay clean doing it.

What follows is a high octane, high stakes adventure, complete with poisonous snakes, international travel, a harrowing helicopter ride, non lethal weapons, and plenty of old scores to settle. Hart takes his idea of recovering assassins and builds on it in the sequel, putting his characters in even more precarious positions and ridiculous amounts of danger. All this is done with the author’s signature tongue-in-cheek humor, and I literally laughed my way through the entire story. Rob Hart is a genius when it comes to dialog, and I’m sure this would be awesome in audio as well.

I loved getting to know Astrid’s backstory too, and while she’s got a fair amount of skeletons in her closet, her overall emotional arc didn’t hit me as hard as Mark’s did in the last book. But I do love the way Hart formats his flashbacks. Each of Astrid’s flashback chapters is labeled with “Twenty-two Year Ago,” “Thirteen Years Ago,” etc., bringing us all the way to the present by the end of the book. Even though the book is fairly short, this method filled in the gaps of Astrid’s younger years and burgeoning assassin career beautifully.

The other character that stuck with me is Booker, a Marine-turned-Black Ops assassin who has been sober for five years. Hart drops hints about his past (even though we don’t get any real flashbacks) that made me wonder if Booker might be the focus of the next book. In any case, I want to learn more about him, he was hysterically funny, lovable and terrifying, all at the same time. Valencia and her baby are barely in the story at all, but I have a feeling they might have more page time in book three.

And of course, there’s Mark, the leader of the gang, who used to be one of the most mysterious and feared assassins of all time. Mark goes through a lot of mental angst in this book, especially since he’s trying to do things that would normally require killing, but because of Assassins Anonymous, he’s unwilling to break his sober streak. This leads to some very funny scenarios involving stun guns, pepper spray and paint ball guns, and he seems to know just how far he can go to knock out his opponents without causing lethal damage. Hart explores the familiar twelve step program of Alcoholics Anonymous and shows how difficult it can be, especially since Mark has been stuck on step eight (making amends) for a while.

Hart asks the question, can assassins really change? And the answer is: sometimes. Mark, Astrid, Booker and the others are all human, even if their assassin personas seemed larger than life, and I loved seeing all of them both succeed and fail in this story.

According to the author, he’s currently working on the next book in the series, which has the wonderful title of Three Hitmen and a Baby. I broke out of my usual genre to try these books, mostly because Rob Hart has written speculative fiction in the past and I’ll read whatever he writes, and I’m so glad I did. This series is the perfect slump-breaker, a thrilling, fast-paced, funny, feel-good tale with some nice messages to boot. Start with Assassins Anonymous, you won’t be disappointed.

Big thanks to the publisher for providing a review copy.