There are some interesting ideas behind this silly novel.  Kit is a teenage girl, about 16 years old.  She lives in London with her parents, going to a private school in a rich neighborhood.  She is isolated at school, with no real friends.  She has a secret life, known only to her mother, who trained her.  Kit is a multiple murderer, and has been killing since she was 9 years old.  She has London scared, and her rate of killing is escalating.  She kills for cash.  People leave messages for her, along with cash, in a secret hiding place that apparently is known to many people with grudges against others, but which the police never gain any knowledge of.  Yet the police see the letters, because Kit leaves the letter with the corpse of the person she killed at the request of the letter writer.  For some mysterious reason, they can’t use this evidence as a strong lead to lead to arrest of the person requesting the death.  Yet once the murder was discovered, the friends and family of the person requesting the murder knew what that initiated. As ridiculous as this is, it is at least an interesting thought that people might hate someone so much that they would be willing to see them dead, even if they knew they would afterwards be shunned by others.  They get what they want but they also get some of the punishment they think they deserve.  Kit does not kill everyone she is asked to kill — she makes the choices on a fairly arbitrary basis.  It is not clear why she does a lot of what she does.  She has been taught to be an ethical nihilist, so she does not believe in right or wrong, and so she does not believe she is doing the right thing.  She seems to get some satisfaction from doing the job well, and she likes getting the money that comes in.  But as the novel goes on, there are hints of dissociation, with one side of her personality starting to take her over, as in a sort of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde scenario.  Kit also likes outsmarting the police.  She manages to befriend the policeman leading the investigation and she starts to help him with the investigation, which makes it seem she wants to be discovered.  This ambivalence seems to fill her life.  She also befriends one of the people she has been asked to kill, and this person ends up becoming closer to Kit than anyone else, yet she still plans on the assigned murder. 

Despite a plot that makes very little sense, what is interesting about this novel is its exploration of the possibility of an amoral killer who has been reared to kill.  Not surprisingly, she has a troubled relationship with her mother and father.  She also yearns for friendship and is deeply isolated with her knowledge of people’s deep secrets which she can’t share with anyone apart from her mother and does not even share with her mother.  We see both Kits unhappiness and also her mother’s, and it leads us to see how a life of murder makes life impossibly unhappy.  So this is provocative as a psychological exploration even if the plot is massively implausible. 

The unabridged audiobook is performed by Heather Wilds.  She seems to be an English actress, but she pronounces some words in accordance with US pronunciation: she says “mom” rather than “mum.”  But she does a good job with trying to bring conviction to the voice of the teenage killer, who is both very knowing and also troubled. 

Most parents are not going to be particularly happy about young teens reading about a teen serial killer, yet this is aimed at a young adult readership.  The fact that the novel was written by a teen is no consolation.  Still, it is no more violent than much prime time TV and it is at least more thoughtful than the average teen novel.

© 2014 Christian Perring

Christian Perring, Professor of Philosophy, Dowling College, New York