Steve Cavanagh’s Eddie Flynn series features a main character who is a lawyer and a con artist. And it is worth keeping that in mind when picking up Cavanagh’s latest stand-alone thriller Kill for Me Kill for You. It has a premise that readers will have encountered before, recently, for example in Katherine Kovacic’s Seven Sisters. But there is a fair amount of Cavanagh sleight of hand that leads readers into what is a different narrative altogether.
There are essentially two major plot threads in Kill for Me Kill for You. The first involves Amanda White, a woman still struggling with the death of her daughter and husband. Amanda spends her days following and plotting kill the man that she knows is responsible, Walter Crone. At court-ordered therapy she meets a woman called Naomi who tells Amanda her own story of denied justice and suggest that they use the technique from the movie Strangers on a Train and kill each other’s nemesis. So far so cliched and fairly well lampshaded. Only not long after this point Cavanagh takes Amanda’s story in a completely different direction. The second thread involves a woman called Ruth, attacked and almost murdered in her own home, coming to terms with the fact that the police cannot find the blue-eyed man who attacked her. Again, this feels like a standard tale, and it is unclear how the two stories relate, until Ruth’s story too takes a significant left turn.
In Kill for Me Kill for You Cavanagh shows once again his effortless ability to deliver a page-turning thriller. The set up for this one takes a little longer than some of his other books. But the series of mini-cliffhangers and then cascading twists and reveals coupled with the rising tension that he manages to create as a result is worth the effort.
Kill for Me Kill for You by Steve Cavanagh
$32.99 AUD
No Comments