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Rob Hart's Assassins Anonymous was one of the most purely entertaining thrillers of 2024 - a book built on a premise so perfectly absurd it shouldn't have worked, yet did so with real emotional heft. The Medusa Protocol, its sequel, faces the unenviable task of recapturing that lightning. It doesn't quite manage it, but what it delivers instead is a brisk, inventive, and frequently hilarious action novel that expands Hart's world in satisfying ways.

The setup is deceptively simple. Astrid - formerly the feared assassin Azrael - has stopped turning up to the group's Tuesday meetings in the basement of a deconsecrated church on Manhattan's Lower East Side. Her sponsor Mark fears the worst, suspecting she's either dead or back in the game. Then a pizza delivery arrives mid-meeting with black olives on top - a topping only Astrid would choose - and the group realises she's alive and sending a coded message. From there, it's a race to find and extract her from a black-site prison on a snake-infested island off the coast of Brazil. The catch, naturally, is that nobody can kill anyone while doing it.

Hart structures the novel across three interleaved timelines: Mark's present-day efforts to mount a rescue alongside Booker, a former black ops mercenary; Astrid's captivity under the care of the sinister Dr Felix Vogt, who is mining her memories for something she doesn't fully understand; and a series of flashbacks charting Astrid's origin story as Azrael and the events that drove her to walk away from killing. The alternating perspectives are cleanly signposted and keep the pacing relentless, though the flashbacks do occasionally interrupt momentum just as a present-day thread builds real tension.

The non-lethal constraint remains the series' masterstroke. Watching trained killers wrestle with stun guns, pepper spray, and paintball guns while infiltrating a heavily guarded facility produces some genuinely laugh-out-loud sequences. Hart's dialogue is razor-sharp throughout, and the banter between Mark and Booker in particular has an easy chemistry that lifts even the more formulaic action beats. The supporting cast - the formidable Ms Nguyen, Valencia with her newborn daughter Lucia - are drawn vividly enough that each could anchor their own novel, though they get somewhat limited page time here.

Where The Medusa Protocol falls slightly short of its predecessor is in its emotional core. Mark's journey in the first book carried a devastating weight that made the humour land harder by contrast. Astrid's backstory, while involving and at times tragic, doesn't cut quite as deep. Her arc from ruthless operative to someone grasping for redemption is compelling on paper, but the emotional payoff doesn't match the buildup. The villain, too, leans toward the cartoonish - Vogt is very much a moustache-twirling type, and his motivations feel thin compared to the richly drawn antagonism of the first book.

Some of the plot mechanics rely on convenient coincidences, and a stretch of dialogue in the middle section runs a little long. But these are minor complaints against a book that does exactly what a good sequel should: it deepens the world, gives new characters room to breathe, and leaves you wanting more. Hart balances wit and brutality with a confidence that few thriller writers can match, and beneath the gunfights and globe-trotting, there's a genuine tenderness to the way these characters care for each other. The Medusa Protocol is a book about found family, about whether people who have done terrible things can truly change, and about the comic absurdity of trying to be good when your entire skill set is built around being very, very bad. It may not hit quite the emotional heights of Assassins Anonymous, but it's enormous fun - and with a third instalment reportedly in the works, there's plenty of reason to stay enrolled.