Title: Killing Katie (Affair with Murder #1)
Author: Brian Spangler
Publisher: Junco Publications
Pages: 416
My GoodReads Rating: ⭐⭐⭐⭐
Amy Sholes, a happily married mother of two kids and wife of a police detective, has a dark secret she can’t confess to anyone, least of all her husband, Steve. Amy enjoys killing, or at least the idea of killing since she has never killed before.
She enjoys tripping on her husband’s case files, imagining herself killing off the dregs of society, the criminals who nobody will miss. But her longest running fantasy is to kill Katie Dawson, her best friend since they were both two years old. It is a fantasy she can’t help, given that she loves Katie and would never do her harm. Which is why she feels compelled to kill somebody evil that the world would not miss, in order to drive the fantasy of killing Katie out of her mind.
But these are not compulsions you can share with another person, least of all your cop husband.
Meeting an internet whiz, Nerd, at the library, Amy is placed squarely on the path to fulfilling her desires. Nerd, whose real name Amy does not know, introduces Amy to the Dark Web, where the worst of human excesses may be bought and sold at a price. Here, he gets Amy her first paid job, to kill Todd, a brutal rapist who raped and battered a young teenager. Amy accepts the job and successfully kills Todd.
But soon the instinct to kill strikes again. And when that happens, what will it mean for Katie? Will she die at Amy’s hands?
You’ll have to read the book to find out.
Killing Katie is written in the first person mixed tense PoV of Amy.
Amy doesn’t act on her Dexter-like fantasies until halfway into the book. Until then, there’s a lot of revealing about the past, but it was done in a manner, suggesting confidences between friends, so I didn’t mind plodding through.
Death isn’t the only thing on Amy’s mind. She is also worried about aging, about life passing her by, about losing her husband.
I liked the way the character evolved, from getting turned on by the very idea of murder to suffering grief at losing a dear one. But grief is not an unfamiliar emotion. Earlier on, when John, a top cop and Steve’s best friend, dies, she experiences the pain of losing a good friend, as also the pain of knowing that it could have been Steve.
She wants to kill not just to fulfil her desire but also as a means to earn money, so Steve can give up being a cop and go back to law school.
The manner in which she lives her double life throws up moments of tension, and the writing style was good.
The explanation about how the Internet works was also good.
(I read this book on NetGalley. Thank you to the author, the publisher and NetGalley.)
No comments:
Post a Comment