53 pages • 1 hour read
Steve CavanaghKill for Me, Kill for You
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2023A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapters 1-8Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 1 Summary: “Amanda”
Content Warning: This section of the guide contains graphic depictions of violence, including sexual violence and violence against children, as well as discussion of suicide and suicidal ideation.
Amanda White uses a baby bottle sterilizer to clean a gun in her kitchen. She feels fundamentally changed by the recent murder of her six-year-old daughter Jess and her husband Luis’s death by suicide a week later. Amanda leaves her apartment and follows her target onto a crowded train. She plans to shoot the man as the train doors open at 79th Street then drop the gun and disappear in the ensuing panic. As she counts down the seconds until the train arrives in the station, the man, Wallace Crone, looks up and recognizes her. He grabs her and begins screaming for police. Amanda drops the gun into a stranger’s bag. As police intervene, Crone insists that he didn’t kill Amanda’s daughter.
Chapter 2 Summary: “Ruth”
Manhattan real estate agent Ruth Gelman sits across from her husband Scott, sensing his judgement as she finishes a bottle of wine knowing that they’re trying to get pregnant. Scott makes plans to meet up with his friends, as he has every other Friday since before their marriage. Ruth feels hurt by her husband’s unwillingness to change his schedule for her, but grateful for the stability their marriage provides. Before leaving, Scott apologizes for his attitude and offers to stay. She encourages him to go, then smokes a joint alone and drinks more wine. Later that night, she wakes to the sound of breaking glass. When she goes downstairs to investigate, a man with piercing blue eyes grabs her and presses a chloroform-soaked rag onto her face, calling her “sweetheart.”
Chapter 3 Summary: “Amanda”
Amanda accepts a plea deal and receives one year of probation, including trauma counseling. Back at home, Amanda sinks into memories of Jess, remembering their nighttime routine and how the little girl would never sleep without Sparkles, her stuffed toy unicorn.
Flashbacks reveal that Jess was kidnapped while at the park with her father, Luis. Three days later, her body was found in a dumpster. Investigating detectives Andrew Farrow and Karen Hernandez believed that convicted sex offender Walter Crone was responsible for Jess’s death, but the district attorney dropped the charges under pressure from Crone’s father, a powerful Wall Street executive. Amanda became obsessed with Crone, which led to her arrest for stalking and planning to kill him.
After Amanda’s plan to kill Crone fails, she feels hopeless and plans to die by suicide. Amanda changes her mind when she learns Crone is suing her for damages caused by harassment.
In Jess’s bedroom, Amanda catches sight of Sparkles. After Luis died by suicide a week after Jess’s murder, Luis’s parents buried him and Jess while Amanda was being cared for in the hospital for her own mental health crisis. Luis’s parents, however, did not know to bury Jess with Sparkles, and now Amanda panics Jess won’t be able to rest in peace without the toy.
Chapter 4 Summary: “Ruth”
After vivid nightmares in which she can see and hear the man who attacked her, Ruth wakes in a hospital. Nurses subdue Ruth and the pain and terror send her into shock. She wakes again to see Scott, who climbs into bed and weeps with her. On the third day, doctors finally reveal that Ruth’s attacker stabbed her 15 times and left her for dead. She managed to call 911 but passed out before paramedics arrived. Detectives Farrow and Hernandez question Ruth about the attack. She describes the chloroform attack and says her attacker has bright blue eyes, high cheekbones, a square jaw, and dark hair. Farrow reveals that the man who attacked her has killed two other women. They cannot explain why he left Ruth alive.
Chapter 5 Summary: “Farrow”
Farrow and Hernandez order chloroform tests for the two victims killed by the suspect in Ruth’s case. Farrow’s back causes him constant pain, and Hernandez is patient as he climbs slowly into the car, encouraging him to take pain medication. At the police precinct, Farrow learns that one of Ruth’s neighbors suffered a heart attack and called paramedics around the same time as Ruth’s attack. Farrow and Hernandez speculate that the attacker was scared by the lights and siren and left Ruth before killing her. Hernandez warns that Ruth’s husband seems controlling and might be a problem. Farrow dismisses her concerns, arguing that men often respond with a primal protective urge after their wives are attacked.
Chapter 6 Summary: “Amanda”
After Amanda delays her court-ordered trauma therapy for a month, Farrow personally drives her to a meeting at an unmarked building in midtown. The leader of the group, Matt, reviews the rules: participants use fake names and avoid personal details in order to maintain a degree of anonymity. He explains that some group members feel more comfortable sharing when they know the rest of the group won’t look up graphic details of their loss. Amanda refuses to share, and a fight breaks out between two members, Wendy and Betty. After the meeting, Amanda follows Wendy into a bar. She tells Wendy her real name and Wendy immediately looks her up. Wendy buys Amanda a drink and suggests they get drunk together.
Chapter 7 Summary: “Ruth”
After Farrow and Hernandez leave, Ruth falls asleep. When she wakes, Scott is asleep, and Ruth narrowly avoids hurting herself while adjusting position, rather than waking him up. Scott is horrified, and promises that he will never leave Ruth alone again. She assures him that the attack isn’t his fault. The night Scott proposed, he had also announced that he was leaving his job as a prosecutor in order to make more money at a big law firm to support their dreams. Ruth had known then that he would always protect her. Ruth’s doctor enters and Scott tries to stop him from discussing Ruth’s status. When Ruth presses, the doctor reveals that damage from the attack will prevent her from carrying children.
Chapter 8 Summary: “Amanda”
Amanda and Wendy are kicked out of the bar, but continue drinking at Wendy’s luxurious apartment. Wendy reveals that, three years prior, her daughter Rebecca’s body was found abandoned in a parking lot. Rebecca’s diary revealed that she was being groomed and raped by a teacher at her private Catholic school, but the school’s lawyers managed to have the charges dropped and the case dismissed. Amanda and Wendy bond over their shared grief and inability to find closure in the criminal justice system, and Wendy suggests that Amanda crash on her couch. The next morning, after a recurring dream about Jess and Luis, a hungover Amanda finds a room full of evidence suggesting that Wendy is stalking her late daughter’s teacher. Amanda leaves knowing Wendy’s real name—Naomi—and shocked by how similar she and her new friend are.
Chapters 1-8 Analysis
Cavanagh begins Kill for Me, Kill for You with a bold opening image of the protagonist, Amanda, using a baby bottle sterilizer to clean a gun, foreshadowing her intentions to kill. Inside the sterilizer, “it look[s] like the gun [is] sweating, its steel frame and barrel beaded with balls of hot condensation, the steam rising gently from the base” (1). This detailed description of the gun frames it as a living being, playing against the gun’s intended purpose as a murder weapon. The symbolic contrast between the bottle sterilizer, intended to protect new life, and the gun, intended to take life, immediately establishes dramatic tension and a menacing narrative tone. This ironic use of the sterilizer also demonstrates the continued presence of Amanda’s late daughter, Jess, whose memory haunts her throughout the novel.
Cavanagh characterizes Amanda as defined by her grief over the death of her daughter and her husband’s subsequent death by suicide, pointing to Cavanagh’s thematic interest in The Lasting Effects of Traumatic Events. The novel introduces Amanda in media res—in the midst of an assassination attempt on Wallace Crone, the man she believes to be responsible for her unthinkable loss. The novel indicates that Amanda’s loss has severely compromised her mental health: After Luis’s death she had been “admitted and sedated in Gracie Square Hospital” in order to prevent her from harming herself (22). The use of the transitive verbs “admitted” and “sedated” in this passage implies Amanda’s full loss of agency during this time. For Amanda, the loss of her daughter and husband is not merely “a traumatic life change—it [is] her life ending” (23). The profound nature of Amanda’s loss ends her life as she knows it and defines the next stage of her life.
In establishing the isolation of Amanda’s grief and the loss of agency she experiences during her treatment, Cavanagh lays the groundwork for the connection that forms between Amanda and Wendy. Amanda responds to her loss by pouring all of her energy into following Wallace Crone in the hopes of catching him trying to kidnap another girl. She watches Crone “for months,” building up a file with “photographs, news articles, memos on his routine, his garbage, his social life, his work” (26). This detailed list highlights the extent of Amanda’s obsession with Crone, which results in a restraining order and her attempts to kill him in the novel’s opening chapter. The novel frames Amanda’s behavior as the result of extreme grief that isolates her and causes her to act outside of her previous norms. However, when Amanda meets Wendy at the Parents Trauma and Bereavement Group, she discovers common ground that gives her a sense of solidarity with Wendy and makes her feel less alone. For example, Amanda finds “a corkboard […] with documents and notes attached to it with dozens of little red pins” (63) in Wendy’s house and realizes that Wendy is obsessively stalking the Catholic priest she believes killed her daughter, Rebecca. Amanda believes both she and Wendy are suffering the consequences of The Limitations and Implicit Bias of the Criminal Justice System and recognizes that their similar response to grief mean that she and Wendy “[are] more alike than Wendy [can] possibly imagine” (65).
Cavanagh employs a dual timeline structure in his narrative, establishing a parallel plot for Ruth Gelman alongside Amanda’s storyline to build dramatic tension as the two plot lines begin to inform one another, progressively revealing the mystery of the thriller. Although there are not yet any clues about the connection between these two timelines in this opening section, Cavanagh provides connective tissue between Amanda and Ruth’s storylines through the investigations of Detectives Andrew Farrow and Karen Hernandez. As the novel progresses, Farrow and Hernandez act as a constant thread guiding readers through the nuances of the two plotlines. The detectives’ reflections on the violent criminals they investigate— their motives, psychology and personal contexts—also underscores the novel’s thematic interest in The Rehabilitation of Violent Offenders.
