Book Review: Steve Cavanagh serves up murder on the double
Steve Cavanagh, author. Photograph Moya Nolan
- Kill For Me Kill For You
- Steve Cavanagh
- Headline, €18
‘Revenge, the sweetest morsel to the mouth that ever was cooked in hell.’ Walter Scott, The Heart of Midlothian
It will come as no surprise to Steve Cavanagh’s multitude of fans, or to the many practitioners of the genre, writers like Lee Child, Mick Herron and Martina Cole who rate him so highly, that he has written another wonderfully twisty and yes, thrilling thriller.
takes the premise of Hitchcock’s 1951 film , based on Patricia Highsmith’s novel of the same name (strangers agree to commit murder for each other to confound any police investigation) and runs with it to fiendishly clever places.
The film is name-checked in the book, with copies of it playing an important role in the plot.
Amanda White has lost her young daughter Jess, who was taken, raped, and murdered, her body thrown in a dumpster, when her husband Luis looked away for a few seconds in a park. Luis has committed suicide, unable to live with the guilt.
The police are sure that known sex offender Wallace Crone is responsible but there is no evidence. When we first meet Amanda she is on a train ready to shoot Crone, but this plan comes unstuck. She must find another way to get revenge, see justice done and achieve some peace of mind.
Ruth Gelman has been attacked in her apartment by a serial killer known as Mr Blue Eyes. He has been scared off before being able to finish his grisly work. Ruth is profoundly traumatised. Her husband Scott, feeling guilty about not having been at home to protect her, will do anything he can to lessen his wife’s pain.
Amanda, Ruth, and Scott are joined as the narrators of alternating chapters by experienced detective Andrew Farrow. Farrow is dedicated, to an obsessive degree, to tracking down murderers. He never lets even the coldest of cases lie, to the sometimes annoyance of his partner Karen Hernandez: ‘...he owed the dead a debt. And he saw to it that it got paid.’ Amanda meets Ruth at a group for survivors of trauma and they hit it off. It isn’t long before the idea of exchanging murders is suggested.
What follows is a narrative full of surprises, with neither things nor people always what they seem to be. The plotting and pacing are expert, the story telling propulsive, and there is some fine authorial legerdemain.
The reader will relish the aptness of the epigraph from Walter Scott as the story unfolds.
Cavanagh was born in Belfast and was a lawyer before becoming a professional writer. He became famous in 2010 when he obtained the largest compensation for moral damages in the legal history of Northern Ireland, for a worker who had been subject to racial discrimination in the workplace.
He has written eight books, instalments in his series featuring the lawyer Eddie Flynn, or standalone title such as the one under review. He is a million seller and the winner of numerous prizes, including the CWA Gold Dagger Award for Crime Novel of the year in 2018 for his third book . won the Theakston Old Peculier Crime Novel of the year in 2019. His books feature heavily in top ten bestseller lists and in bestseller lists in countries such as Germany.
stands out in a crowded genre and will deservedly be another huge success.
