Dear Killer by Katherine Ewell (review)

Kit’s mother began training Kit to be an assassin when she was only nine years old; now, at sixteen, she is known as the Perfect Killer, the most feared serial killer in London since Jack the Ripper. Unlike most serial killers, though, Kit murders for hire, collecting requests and fees through a secret mailbox that some dismiss as the stuff of urban legend, but others use to convey their desire to have those who have hurt them eliminated. The moral nihilism that her mother has ingrained in her protects her from any pangs of conscience and her careful precision protects her from the law, but both these protections begin to unravel as she accepts a job too close to home and befriends a handsome young police officer who is investigating the Perfect Killer. While the teenaged author’s writing is occasionally amateurish, the premise and the working out of Kit’s wavering commitment to her unusual upbringing are grimly fascinating as they probe deeply into profound questions of moral relativism and human value. Kit is believably caught between a desire to please her mother and believe in the rightness of the teachings of her childhood, and a growing awareness that she can no longer psychologically bear her occupation. The reasons people want other people dead are unexpectedly banal, but Kit doesn’t seem to pass judgment, and that becomes part of a consistency in her motivations that readers will need to tease out: she kills because other people want her to, first her mother, and then the letter-writers, but that simplicity begins to fray as she starts to want things for herself and question her place in the larger world. Underneath the dark sensationalism thus lurks a complex framing of moral questions that thoughtful teens will want to grapple with.