REVIEW: How I’ll Kill You by Ren DeStefano

JennieB- Reviews / Book Reviewsserial killers / Suspense / thriller9 Comments

Dear Ms. DeStefano,

When Jayne asked us if anyone wanted a review copy of this book, I was probably the most natural choice, but I demurred. Sure, I enjoy a good twisty thriller, but I’m philosophically opposed to serial-killer protagonists.

Still, I had to admit, the blurb was compelling:

Make him want you.

Make him love you.

Make him dead.

Sissy has an…interesting family. Always the careful one, always the cautious one, she has handled the cleanup while her serial killer sisters have carved a path of carnage across the US. Now, as they arrive in the Arizona heat, Sissy must step up and embrace the family pastime of making a man fall in love and then murdering him. Her first target? A young widower named Edison—and their mutual attraction is instant. While their relationship progresses, and most couples would be thinking about picking out china patterns and moving in together, Sissy’s family is reminding her to think about picking out burial sites and moving on.

Then something happens that Sissy never anticipated: She begins to feel protective of Edison, and before she can help it, she’s fallen in love. But the clock is ticking, and her sisters are growing restless. It becomes clear that the gravesite she chooses will hide a body no matter what happens; but if she betrays her family, will it be hers?

So, I reconsidered, put aside my doubts, and plunged in. At first, I was glad I did, but now, having finished the book a bit ago, my feelings about it are complicated.

Sissy, Moody and Iris are identical triplets. Those aren’t their real names; at least they aren’t the names that the three were given after being discovered as infants, abandoned in a single stroller, in California. But they are the names they’ve chosen to use amongst themselves. Sissy has another name now, an alias she’s taken on since the three moved to a small town in Arizona: she is Jade.

The triplets are 24; they’ve been traveling around the country since they were 18. It was then that Sissy received a frantic call that Iris’s lover, her married high school guidance counselor, was dead, and her sisters needed her help. They’ve killed five more men in that time (for a total of six, including the guidance counselor). Iris and Moody apparently have three kills apiece, but Sissy aborted her one attempt at luring and murdering a man, saying that he wasn’t the “right one.” She seems to have a rather romantic, dreamy vision of murder, though her participation in the previous deaths has been confined to cleanup and logistics (not very romantic tasks). Sissy grew up an avid fan of true crime shows, and so she knows the best ways to make someone disappear without leaving any evidence behind.

The minute Sissy spots Edison, she gets the feeling that he is the one. She stalks him and manages to catch his attention by singing at the church he attends. Their relationship progresses quickly from there. Sissy helps Edison when he breaks his sobriety; he’s an alcoholic who has been sober for years.

Meanwhile, Iris and Moody are mostly confined to the apartment the three have rented, stuck inside with the blinds shut. No one in this small town is supposed to know there are three of them; for one thing, one will be somewhere public providing an alibi when the deed is being done. That’s part of how the plan works.

Things start off rather rocky though; in one of their first days in town, Moody and Sissy stop out in the desert by an unbuilt subdivision (Sissy wants to show her sister where she plans to bury the body), and an older man in a truck stops to see if they need help. Moody hides, and Sissy thinks she can handle the situation, but Moody abruptly hits the stranger over the head with a tire iron. Just like that, they are having to get rid of a body, and it’s not even someone that’s part of their “plan.”

Rereading this, I’m kind of horrified by the murder. Sissy does spend some time wondering if the man had a wife, and if so, would she wonder what had happened to him, etc. But she never seems to feel real remorse or a sense of horror, even while knocking out the corpse’s teeth with a hammer to make him harder to identify.

Sissy continues to get closer to Edison while also starting a friendship with her next door neighbor, Dara. Her sisters quickly come to suspect that Sissy isn’t eager to kill Edison, though Sissy herself takes a long time to admit that to herself. She meets Edison’s stepdaughter, the child of his late wife. Their relationship is tense at first, but Sissy manages to ingratiate herself and finds herself coming to care about yet another person out of her tight, three-person circle.

I was really caught up in How I’ll Kill You when I was reading it. The thriller aspect is decent; it was hard to imagine an HEA so I was left wondering if Sissy would end up killing Edison, which created a good deal of tension. But what really drew me to the story was the dysfunctional relationship of the triplets.

Sissy, Moody and Iris were mostly separated as children after the age of five; for a good chunk of that time Sissy lived with a foster mother who was decent to her, while the other two cycled through various foster and group homes. It was a tough upbringing for all three girls, who saw each other infrequently. When the did manage to get together, Sissy was often compelled to prove her loyalty to her sisters and disdain for her foster mother, which of course caused problems that ended with her going to a group home as well.

Ultimately, with a little distance, I’ve decided that I still find the “serial killer protagonist” trope distasteful. What compelled me was the very human and relatable story of how Sissy, Moody and Iris chose to reinforce their bonds and smother their individuality. It’s never really clear why they target romantic partners for their murders; I had at first assumed some sort of empowered-feminist angle, but that’s not really evident in the story. If anything, at least from Sissy’s perspective (which is somewhat skewed by the fact that she’s never actually killed a lover before), it’s about keeping the man with you forever, or at least ending any life they have after you. Which is, of course, quite sick.

But the killings have an even more sinister (at least to me) purpose that becomes clear: much like Sissy being forced to, say, put a dead mouse in her foster mother’s bed to “prove” that she hated her and was loyal to her sisters, the murders bind the sisters together ever more tightly. There’s the months of enforced hiding in a tiny apartment together, the occasional swapping of identities, and the huge fact that they are complicit in crimes that would end in life imprisonment for each of them. Every kill, every cleanup, every step of the plans they make and execute reinforces the notion that the three are a single organism, and no one of them can break off without killing all of them (literally or figuratively).

On a basic level I could relate to the bonds of family and the sometimes painful process of individuation. Of course, the triplets take everything a level that absolutely can’t relate to, but I was fascinated and compelled to see how it would all end. I cared about Sissy; at times her naivete about murder felt unrealistic, but at the same time she had experienced a lot of trauma in her life and had defense mechanisms built up, so perhaps she was really compartmentalizing and genuinely wasn’t in touch with the idea that she didn’t actually want to kill anyone.

For me there’s an odd disconnect between the “co-dependent sisters” and the “merry murderesses” plotlines. I think for the latter to have worked on any level for me it would have had to have been highly stylized, with victims that I as a reader wouldn’t care about (we don’t have many details on their victims at all, but that didn’t keep me from feeling bad that they’d been brutally killed). Instead, the story starts to get grim as it becomes clear that rather than one smooth organism comprised of equal parts, Sissy has been to some degree manipulated by both Moody and Iris for most of her life.

The ending didn’t really work for me, for reasons that would be too spoilery to go into. But it boiled down again to a clash between realism and fantasy. There are some things you just don’t come back from. My grade for How I’ll Kill You is a B-.

Best,

Jennie

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Jennie

has been an avid if often frustrated romance reader for the past 15 years. In that time she's read a lot of good romances, a few great ones, and, unfortunately, a whole lot of dreck. Many of her favorite authors (Ivory, Kinsale, Gaffney, Williamson, Ibbotson) have moved onto other genres or produce new books only rarely, so she's had to expand her horizons a bit. Newer authors she enjoys include Julie Ann Long, Megan Hart and J.R. Ward, and she eagerly anticipates each new Sookie Stackhouse novel. Strong prose and characterization go a long way with her, though if they are combined with an unusual plot or setting, all the better. When she's not reading romance she can usually be found reading historical non-fiction.

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