Hannah Deitch’s debut, Killer Potential, is one of those stories that sneaks up on you and before too many pages have turned has its claws in you good and solid. The story is a first-person narrative in the voice of Evie Gordon, a 20-something whose early academic promise has fizzled out, leaving her with a part-time, barely-keeping-the-wolf-from-the-door job. She’s a tutor for high schoolers whose wealthy parents can’t see the possibility of failure as something that will work for them. Her life seems rather dull, and it certainly is dull to her.
As the story begins, Evie is driving to her regular tutoring appointment with Serena Victor. But from the moment she walks up to the Victors’ quirky Southern California mansion – it has a moat and rumours of secret passageways – and finds the front door wide open, you know Evie’s about to walk in on something better avoided.
She walks inside, calls out. The house is quiet. Empty. She walks to the back yard. There, in the koi pond is Serena’s father, drowned, and sitting on a lounge chair, her mother, whose bashed-in face reveals she’s dead too.
On the verge of calling the police, Evie hears a small voice from under the stairs crying for help and finds a young woman she’s never seen before tied up inside. The woman is terrified. Her neck is badly bruised. She doesn’t smell nice. How long has she been there? Evie frees her and once more, before she can call the police, Serena appears. She screams when she sees the women, and, possibly misreading the situation, attacks. Evie fights back, and Serena falls.
She thinks she’s killed her. Then Serena’s boyfriend arrives. With all three Victors (an ironic name, for sure) now dead, Evie and the woman flee before Lukas can summon the police, afraid they’ll be accused of all three murders. This is page 20.
From here on, it’s a cat-and-mouse game. Evie and the strange woman (named Jae, it turns out), must stay one step ahead of the massive womanhunt that ensues. For the media and possibly even for the authorities, their flight is as good as a confession. Evie’s only hope is that, somehow, the police will identify the parents’ real killer and that Serena, who isn’t dead, will emerge from her coma. Then she and Jae can come forward.
Evie has two main issues with Jae. Jae doesn’t talk. Why she was at the house, who tried to strangle her, whether anyone else was there – all is locked up inside her. On the other side of the ledger, Jae turns out to be an excellent provider. She’s an expert at stealing cars, wallets, money, food– everything they need for life on the lam.
This adventure can turn out badly in so many ways, and the media frenzy keeps the pressure on. I was particularly drawn in by the way the two of them learn to cooperate, depending on each other first out of necessity, but eventually with respect and affection. It’s the main relationship in the story, and it’s handled beautifully by the author. While Evie and Jae try to minimise their interactions with outsiders– any one of whom may recognise them, and many do – Deitch produces distinctive, memorable characters for even these brief encounters.
Her choice to have Evie narrate the story, apart few short chapters near the end that Jae narrates, was a good one. Being in Evie’s head, you see how she is emotionally navigating the stresses of their perilous situation. She’s a pretty conventional person tied up with an unconventional partner in a dangerous situation. You come to feel you really know Evie and understand why she is making the choices she makes, even when you don’t agree with them. She and Jae are quick thinkers in tough situations and creative despite the many constraints on their actions. For example, Evie would love to call her parents, to let them know she’s all right, to reassure them of her innocence, but of course she dare not call anyone she knows.
You travel with them from Los Angeles to the Gulf Coast, diagonally across the country to Washington State, to Canada. They can flee, but can they escape? Not merely the authorities, but themselves too. It’s a wild ride.
Also see Witness 8 by Steve Cavanagh or The Perfect Lie by Jo Spain.
W&N
Print/Kindle/iBook
£16.99
CFL Rating: 5 Stars
