Mark Rubinstein. Assassin’s Lullaby. Thunder Lake, 2022.

Assassin’s Lullaby has echoes of the novels of Daniel Silva. There is a difference, though. In Silva’s tales, Gabriel Allon is an Israeli spymaster. In Assassin’s Lullaby, Eli Dagan is a former Israeli spy. He did not get burned, but apparently got burned out.

So how does he make a living now? He is a paid assassin, a hit man. Instead of killing terrorists, now he kills bad guys for other bad guys. From his experience in Mossad, he has learned to be very careful. He mostly uses the Dark Web for communication. He has a modern Dial M for Murder program. No one ever sees him, but they pay him to offshore banks when he has completed a job.

The author is a psychiatrist, and he does a great job of presenting Eli’s point of view. No, Eli is not proud of his work, but he could no longer stand being in Israel. It had too many painful memories. All he really knew how to do was be an assassin-spy. He knew how to disappear. He had many aliases—in fact, at one point things get a little confusing because we are told he has just abandoned one alias, but then he uses it a few pages later.

For most the story, though, he is simply Aiden. People are not even sure what nationality he is. Irish maybe? His mother was American, so he learned American English as well as Hebrew, German, and Yiddish growing up. He was hired by Mossad because he had great language acquisition skills. He wanted to join Mossad because his family had been blown up in a terrorist attack on a passenger bus in Tel Aviv, and he was looking for justice.

Now, though, he has done something a little different. A Russian mobster in New York City has contacted him. He wants him to do two jobs. If he completes the first, he will get the second. However, Eli agrees to meet him in person. For the first time since he has been doing contract killing, a client knows what he looks like.

The job is a complicated one. Anton Gorlov wants him to take out a competing Russian mob boss. His victim is heavily guarded and has been arrested by the authorities, so he can only travel a few blocks in Brooklyn and is usually under surveillance. Normally Gorlov would let him be, but he is afraid that he will testify against Gorlov to get a lighter sentence.

The second job is very different, and it will have a few surprise twists. Gorlov’s former money manager recently “committed suicide” by defenestration. Gorlov is afraid that before he died, he may have made copies of his accounting that would implicate Gorlov and his “team” in a number of crimes. This associate only had one living relative, a newly-immigrated sister who may have a flash drive or some other record of these transactions. All Eli/Aiden has to do is get the flash drive, probably by befriending this Irina.

Eli is no tyro here. He understands that if Irina gets caught up in this, she will probably be killed or else kidnapped to be a prostitute in some Near Eastern or Eastern European country. This is complicated. He knows he needs to get the information, be it on a flash drive or whatever. But he also realizes that this sister is probably completely innocent of her brother’s business and has no idea of the danger she is in. What can he do to keep her safe?

We also learn that while Eli is skilled at surveillance and espionage, he also has an informal team of friends who he knows can help him. He never stays in a place longer than six months, so he has a real estate connection who is helpful and knows of some safe houses. He also has a connection with a skilled forger and with a medical doctor who believes in what the Mossad does. All of these people figure in the story.

The tale is therefore brutally realistic. In fact, it is even told in the present tense, so we get a sense of what Eli is thinking at all times. We occasionally learn what others like Gorlov and Irina are thinking from what they say to others.

We get a sense of why, for example, Gorlov went into the rackets. He is a Ukrainian Jew who used to get beat up in the streets of Odessa. He learned to fight back and formed a little gang while he was still a teenager. It grew from there. His mother survived Babi Yar, so he was brought up with the idea that world is a hostile environment, and only the strong survive.

When Eli meets Irina, he falls for her. Yes, she is a beauty. He compares her to Anna Kournikova or Melania Trump. But she also has a lot of pain in her past. She seems to understand him better than most women he has met. What can he do to help her?

The Assassin’s Lullaby is very well paced. The plotting by the gangsters, by Eli, and, of course, by extension the author is very clever. There a few unexpected twists. Even the epilogue, which at first just seems like a wrap-up, itself has a couple of neat surprises. This is psychologically engaging but also very entertaining. You may think you are being lulled from time to time, but, after all, the lullaby of an assassin is meant to relax the victim.

As suggested from the title, this is violent and may not be for everyone, but the violence is neither excessive nor gratuitous. Like Final Witness, it seems like Russian killers have no soul.