Killer Potential by Hannah Deitch Mid-Book Review

Written By Sara Alba
I'm Halfway Through Killer Potential and I'm Not Okay | Brewtiful Living
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Let me set the scene. It's Tuesday night. I'm on the couch with a coffee that has gone completely cold. I have not moved in two hours. My cat is staring at me like she can tell something is wrong. She is correct. Something is wrong. I am 180 pages into Killer Potential by Hannah Deitch, and I am not okay.

Here's what the book is, technically: a darkly funny road-trip thriller about Evie Gordon, a burned-out scholarship kid turned SAT tutor for the ultra-rich of Los Angeles. Evie shows up to a routine lesson at a Beverly Hills estate — complete with a literal moat, because of course — and instead finds the parents brutally murdered and a woman locked in a closet. She frees her. They run. Within hours, America has decided they're both killers. Chaos ensues. The nation watches.

What the book is in practice: a character study wearing a thriller like a costume it stole from a dead rich person's mansion.

We all have killer potential. The question is just what it takes to find out.

Evie narrates the whole thing in this sharp, breathless, almost confessional voice — and here is the thing about her voice: it is funny. Not joke-funny. Not "the author is winking at you" funny. Funny the way a person is funny when they are incredibly smart and absolutely at the end of their rope. She is observing everything with this precise, darkly comic clarity, and you are laughing, and then you realize what you are laughing at, and suddenly it is not funny anymore — except it still kind of is?

Deitch is doing something genuinely tricky here. She has written a novel about class, ambition, the mythology of meritocracy, and what America does to people it once called gifted. Evie believed she was special. She graduated from an elite university. She was supposed to become someone. Instead she is drowning in debt, tutoring teenagers who will never have to worry about money, watching her potential curdle in real time. And then she accidentally becomes the most wanted woman in the country — and finally, perversely, she is someone. Her face is on every magazine. People have opinions about her. She has arrived.

That is the knife twist in the book's center. And Deitch keeps turning it.

Then there's Jae. She doesn't talk. We don't know who she is, why she was at the house, who tried to strangle her, or whose side she's on — and she is not about to tell us. What she will do is steal a car with alarming efficiency and silently keep them both alive through sheer competence. The dynamic between these two women is the entire heartbeat of the book. Evie, who cannot stop analyzing everything. Jae, who communicates entirely in actions. Two people who have no reason to trust each other, building something that starts as necessity and is becoming something else entirely.

Which brings me to my problem.

Multiple reviews have called this book a Thelma and Louise for our times. Paula Hawkins — The Girl on the Train Paula Hawkins — blurbed it with exactly that sentiment. And I love that for this book. I love that these two women are unclassifiable and dangerous and falling into something real with each other on the run. I love every second of it. And Thelma and Louise drove off a cliff.

I am at page 180. I have 140 pages left. And I am sitting with this low, persistent, couch-anchoring dread that Hannah Deitch — who clearly loves these women, who has written them with such care — might be about to break my heart completely. The book is too smart to give us easy. It telegraphs nothing. Every corner has a twist. I genuinely do not know what is coming.

This is the highest compliment I can give a book, by the way. I am also considering not finishing it so I can live in the version where they are fine.

The Evie & Jae Anxiety Meter

Fellow readers — what do you think? Cast your vote and see where the community lands.

1,847 readers have weighed in

Whatever happens, I'll say this: Killer Potential is the kind of book that makes you feel like you've been slightly altered by the time you put it down. Deitch has a voice I want to follow into whatever she writes next. The satire is sharp enough to draw blood. The heart underneath it is real enough to bruise. And Evie Gordon, burned-out gifted kid turned accidental outlaw, is one of the most fully realized protagonists I've encountered in years.

I am going to finish it tonight. Probably with my cold coffee. Probably with my cat judging me. I am scared and I do not care. That is what a good book does.

Sara Alba
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