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 20-32Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 20 Summary: “Amanda”
Naomi provides Amanda with a carefully choreographed plan to kill Quinn. She sneaks into his back garden to steal an axe, breaks a downstairs window, and hides in the shadows to wait for him to come outside and investigate. Amanda is nervous, but wants to give Naomi the same relief she feels. At the last second, she panics and drops the axe. Quinn chases and attacks her, pinning her to the ground and telling her to sleep.
Chapter 21 Summary: “Scott”
Scott chases the blue-eyed man into his hotel room and slams the door shut. He repeatedly hits the man in the head with the champagne bottle, causing it to shatter. The man begins to fight back and Scott stabs him repeatedly in the face with the fragmented bottle neck. When he realizes the man is dead, Scott uses his experience as a district attorney to begin to hide evidence of his involvement in the murder.
Chapter 22 Summary: “Amanda”
Amanda manages to escape Quinn’s grasp by stabbing him in the arm with a screwdriver. She tries to hide in Quinn’s toolshed, but he follows her and breaks in using the axe. Amanda hits him in the head with a hammer, temporarily stunning him, but he continues to attack her. Finally she kills him with the axe. She escapes as police cars arrive. As she walks to her car, she notices a man in an Escalade watching her.
Chapter 23 Summary: “Scott”
Scott walks to a nearby Target to buy bleach, gloves, garbage bags, and new clothes. He pours bleach on the body and around the hotel room in order to erase evidence that he was there. He memorizes the man’s name, Patrick Travers, and his address, then returns to Ruth in their room. Ruth does not recognize the name. She immediately accepts Scott’s suggestion that they leave the hotel room and New York City.
Chapter 24 Summary: “Amanda”
Amanda ditches her car and enters the subway. She notices the man from the Escalade following her, and runs into the nearest train, losing him. At home, she washes the blood off of her and prepares to destroy her blood-stained clothes. She falls asleep in the bath and does not dream for the first time in months. While getting breakfast the next morning, she is shocked to see Crone out on his normal commute.
Chapter 25 Summary: “Ruth”
Ruth and Scott attempt to leave the city. Ruth feels paralyzed with fear. She feels silly for being so scared while in public with her husband, but also believes that the man who attacked her is actively stalking her. Her fear returns her to the summer when she was 12 and her parents divorced. Ruth and Scott miss their train but take a ferry out of the city. Scott promises that everything will be okay.
Chapter 26 Summary: “Amanda”
Amanda is devastated to know that Crone is alive, and willing to kill him herself to once again feel the relief of believing he is dead. She attempts to contact Naomi, but receives no answer. Amanda realizes that the articles she found about Naomi’s daughter and Quinn were faked by Naomi. She breaks into Naomi’s apartment but finds it completely empty. As she leaves, she wonders who exactly she killed the night before.
Chapter 27 Summary: “Ruth”
Scott reveals that he plans to take Ruth to Hartford, Connecticut in order to hide from anyone looking for them. Ruth is confused by their circuitous route, and Scott explains that he didn’t want to wait for another train and thought a ferry would be peaceful. Ruth notices that Scott is sweating and seems nervous, but wills herself to trusts him. On the ferry to Connecticut, Ruth sees Scott drop his backpack into the water.
Chapter 28 Summary: “Farrow”
Farrow and Hernandez arrive at the brownstone where Quinn was attacked, although they do not know his name. Because the attacker entered through the back of the house, they suspect it may be the killer known as Mr. Blue Eyes. Other evidence points to a domestic dispute between lovers. Farrow suggests that neither theory is right, but that DNA evidence may help. Paramedics reveal that the victim of the attack survived.
Chapter 29 Summary: “Amanda”
Alone in her apartment, Amanda relives her violent attack on Quinn. She is overwhelmed with anger at Naomi and remorse for her own actions. She considers turning herself in, but knows there is no proof Naomi set her up. She watches TV for news of the attack and learns that the man she attacked survived. Relieved, she determines to find Naomi and learn why she was set up and who she attacked.
Chapter 30 Summary: “Ruth”
Ruth wakes to find that Scott is not beside her. She finds him in the living room of their rental apartment, watching television. Ruth can sense Scott’s tension, but tries to ignore it. Later, she overhears a news report about the murder of a senior advisor to the mayor in the hotel she and Scott stayed in on the night they left. She realizes that Scott killed the man she believed to be her attacker, and thanks him, saying that she never loved him more.
Chapter 31 Summary: “Amanda”
Amanda meets with the leader of her grief counseling group to try to get more information on Naomi. When he reveals that he keeps records in his car, she breaks in to read Naomi’s file. Because Naomi’s listed address is the empty apartment and her phone number is the burner phone, Amanda assumes “Naomi” is also a fake name. She also learns that “Naomi” joined the group after she did. Amanda decides to visit Quinn in the hospital.
Chapter 32 Summary: “Ruth”
Ruth spends an hour comforting an upset Scott and assuring him that he did the right thing in killing her attacker. She feels calm and confident and compares the feeling to the moment she discovered her mother was in remission from cancer. Ruth volunteers to leave the rental on her own to buy breakfast. Shocked, Scott asks if she’s leaving him. She assures him she’s just trying to take her life back now that she is safe.
Chapters 20-32 Analysis
In this section of Kill for Me, Kill for You, Cavanagh parallels the escalation of violence in each of his dual storylines as Scott’s murder of Patrick Travers mirrors Amanda’s attempted murder of Frank Quinn, framing them as similar attacks with very different outcomes. Scott’s murder of Patrick Travers features some of the most violent imagery in the novel. Scott stabs Travers with a broken champagne bottle, gouging out his eye and leaving in its place “four inches of wine bottle that stood up-right, like a chimney, from his eye socket” (143). The murder leaves a trail of blood and gore, which “leak[s] from that ruptured eye socket and spread[s] across the carpet” of the hotel room (143). The violence of Cavanagh’s descriptions of the “rage” that accompanies Scott’s feelings of powerlessness over both his failure to protect his wife and The Limitations and Implicit Bias of the Criminal Justice System.
The gory resonance of Amanda’s attempted murder of Frank Quinn and Scott’s murder of Patrick Travers in Chapter 49 underscores the internal impact of their respective trauma. Like Scott, Amanda also stabs her victim with an unconventional weapon, driving a “screwdriver through the back of his arm” (146). When this weapon doesn’t stop Quinn’s counterattacks, she attacks him with an axe, burying it “in the center of Quinn’s chest, knocking him off his feet” (148). Like Scott, Amanda also leaves the murder weapon inside the victim’s body: A police officer jokes that they’ll only be able to examine the weapon “when the doctors separate it from his rib cage” (178). The image of Quinn unconscious with an axe handle sticking out of his chest mirrors the earlier image of Travers dead with a champagne bottle sticking out of his face. The gory aftermath of Amanda’s attack also mirrors Scott’s: When Farrow comes to investigate several hours after the attack, he finds “a pool of blood” in the yard, “still wet and […] black in the darkness” (177). Having established both characters’ desire for relief from their internal trauma, Cavanagh imbues both Amanda and Scott’s attacks with an emotional undercurrent that emphasizes The Lasting Effects of Traumatic Experiences.
In Ruth’s plotline, Scott’s murder of Travers empowers Ruth, setting her on a trajectory of violence and revenge that Cavanagh will reveal when the plotlines converge. Knowledge of Travers’s death has a physical impact on Ruth: “[H]er shoulders no longer [ache] with tension” while her normally shaky fingers “[are] still, no tremors” (187). Because she believes Travers to be the man who attacked her, news of his death brings Ruth an “extraordinary sense of elation and relief” conventional justice failed to provide (198). While Amanda’s plotline seems to be falling into chaos, Ruth’s seems to be resolving as the man she believes attacked her is dead and she and Scott escape undetected to Connecticut.
Amanda’s attack of Quinn represents the midpoint of the novel as, with the reveal that Naomi is not who she says she is, Cavanagh’s dual plotlines begin to converge. Amanda realizes that “Naomi ha[s] laid a careful, convincing trap for [her]” and she is no longer in charge of events surrounding her (168). Because of Naomi’s deception, “the clock [is] ticking […] the cops [will] be looking for her soon” (183). As a result, Amanda is forced to take extreme measures to preserve her safety and security, raising the stakes of the plot. Amanda’s central drives shifts to self-preservation as she attempts to overcome the effects of Naomi’s manipulation and avoid arrest.
