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 50-64Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 50 Summary: “Ruth”
In 2018, Ruth—who has shed all traces of her “Naomi” alter ego—waits for news of Quinn’s condition. She is relieved to know that he is likely to die, but misses the warm, euphoric feeling that she felt at Travers’s death. She drives to a new apartment, which has already been unpacked, and checks five separate burner phones, where she is using five identities to manipulate new victims.
Lying in bed, Ruth locks her fears and anxieties in an “old oak chest” in her mind (270), which is a calming technique she learned during her time being treated in a psychiatric center.
Chapter 51 Summary: “Farrow”
At two o’clock in the morning on Thanksgiving, Farrow waits in the police precinct for DNA results from the scene of Quinn’s attack. Farrow has officially taken over the Quinn case, against the wishes of his partner Hernandez. Hernandez agrees to complete the grunt work necessary to clear the case. Farrow receives a call from the DNA lab, then attempts to call Amanda.
Chapter 52 Summary: “Amanda”
Amanda’s research shows that six men resembling each other were murdered across New York in the three years since Ruth’s release from the psychiatric facility. Because the crimes are accelerating in frequency, Amanda believes Ruth is vulnerable to capture. As Amanda attempts to dispose of her bloody clothes from the night of Quinn’s attack, Farrow appears, and she is forced to hide in a nearby laundromat.
Chapter 53 Summary: “Ruth”
Ruth watches the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade from an expensive restaurant at the top of the department store. She leaves the event feeling happy and nostalgic. In the elevator, she encounters a blue-eyed family and sees them whisper “hello sweetheart” to her. Believing the father to be Mr. Blue Eyes, she follows the family into their building, finds their apartment number, and vows to kill them.
Chapter 54 Summary: “Amanda”
Farrow leaves Amanda a cold message insisting she comes into the precinct. Amanda packs a bag to flee, taking Luis’s wedding ring and Jess’s toy, Sparkles the unicorn, with her.
As she is packing, Amanda is served official papers from Crone’s lawyers taking her to court for damages related to her stalking. Billy offers to pick Amanda up and reveals that he has obtained the name and number of Ruth’s doctor from the psychiatric center. Amanda insists that they question him.
Chapter 55 Summary: “Farrow”
At the precinct, Farrow reviews his files from the Mr. Blue Eyes case. He struggles with guilt over his inability to solve that case and others, like the murder of Jess White. He feels like he owes it to both the dead and their surviving loved ones to solve murder cases. He feels especially guilty about the pain he knows is coming to Amanda.
Chapter 56 Summary: “Amanda”
Amanda and Billy visit Dr. Marin, who treated Ruth in the psychiatric facility. He refuses to help until Amanda mentions the death of Dan Puccini, the officer Ruth believed spoke to her through the television. Dr. Marin gives them the number of Ruth’s only visitor, Jack, who admits to providing her with fake identification documents after Scott’s death. Billy gives the aliases to his private investigator.
Chapter 57 Summary: “Ruth”
When none of Ruth’s normal self-soothing routines work, she determines to kill the blue-eyed family, the Grangers. She buys an elaborate fruit basket and dresses as a delivery person, planning to wound Mr. Blue Eyes when he opens the door then kill his family in front of him. As she prepares, she wonders why she never considered killing him directly before.
Chapter 58 Summary: “Amanda”
Amanda and Billy exchange stories about their loved ones over dinner. Billy assures her that Crone will be punished someday. Billy’s private investigator calls and reveals that one of Ruth’s aliases was recently used in a credit check for a Brooklyn apartment. Billy suggests that Ruth may have moved in after fleeing her “Naomi” apartment. The pair leave to find her.
Chapter 59 Summary: “Ruth”
Ruth drives to the Grangers’ apartment feeling empowered by her decision to kill them personally. When the building concierge refuses to let her upstairs, she hits him with her gun then strangles him violently. As she climbs the 10 flights toward the apartment, Ruth hears Scott’s voice telling her to stop. She pushes it aside and proceeds toward the apartment.
Chapter 60 Summary: “Amanda”
Billy calls Dr. Marin with the address connected to Ruth’s alias. Dr. Marin agrees to meet them at the apartment, but insists on bringing the police with him. Billy tells Amanda that the scene might be dangerous, and suggests dropping her off elsewhere. Amanda insists on accompanying him, explaining that she needs proof of Ruth’s involvement in Quinn’s murder.
Chapter 61 Summary: “Farrow”
Quinn dies, changing his case from a home invasion to a homicide. Farrow regrets that he never got to interview Quinn. Hernandez chastises Farrow for not speaking to Amanda about the DNA results. Farrow receives a phone call from Dr. Marin, who asks him to come to the Brooklyn apartment and help subdue Ruth Gelman, who trusted him when he worked on her case.
Chapter 62 Summary: “Amanda”
When Billy and Amanda arrive at the address connected to Ruth’s alias, they see her leaving with a large gift basket. They follow her to a luxury apartment building, and send the new address to Dr. Marin. They are able to save the doorman’s life, and he sends Billy to the Grangers’ apartment. Farrow, Hernandez, and Dr. Marin arrive. Hernandez and Dr. Marin go upstairs, while Farrow tells Amanda that a recent tip about Crone came back negative.
Chapter 63 Summary: “Ruth”
As Ruth tries to break into the Grangers’ apartment, she is stopped by Billy, who takes out contacts and reveals himself to be Mr. Blue Eyes. He explains that he recognized his resemblance to Travers and realized Ruth was hunting him, so he began to try to find her to finish the attack he started 11 years ago. As Dr. Marin and Hernandez approach, Billy replaces his contacts. Dr. Marin believes Ruth’s fear to be a hallucination, and he sedates her.
Chapter 64 Summary: “Amanda”
Two months later, Amanda is visited by Farrow, who reveals that a partial match to her DNA was found at Quinn’s home. She thinks he is suspicious, but he drops the topic. He reveals that Crone was found dead in a dumpster, but accepts Amanda’s alibi without question. Amanda receives a note from Billy admitting that he knew Ruth in advance of the recent events, but used Amanda as a buffer from police. Billy also admits to killing Crone.
Amanda goes to a beach and burns Billy’s note along with Sparkles the unicorn, believing the latter will be reunited with Jess. Amanda feels at peace for the first time since Jess’s murder.
Chapters 50-64 Analysis
In the final act of Kill for Me, Kill for You, Cavanagh dramatically shifts his portrayal of Ruth from her characterization in the past timeline, demonstrating The Lasting Effects of Traumatic Experiences through Ruth’s transformation. The death of her husband by suicide and seven years in a psychiatric institution have made Ruth more ruthless and more susceptible to mental health crises in 2018 than she was in 2007. In Chapter 9, for example, just six weeks after the home invasion, Ruth has a debilitating physical reaction to seeing a man with blue eyes: “[T]he oxygen turn[s] to cement in her chest, her eyes [are] wide, staring, her body unable to move, her voice strangled in total panic” (71). In this passage, 2008-Ruth’s fear prevents her from breathing, let alone acting to protect or defend herself. When she’s finally able to act, she runs away. In contrast, 2018-Ruth channels her trauma-induced terror into an impulse for violent action. When she spots the blue-eyed Granger family in the Macy’s elevator, Ruth experiences the physical response of panic: “her body [shutting] down as if someone had thrown a circuit breaker in her brain” (285). But, rather than panicking and running away, Ruth realizes that “she needed to act fast” and “kill this blue-eyed man family by herself” (288). This dramatic shift in Ruth’s characterization demonstrates the intense effects of her trauma, which transforms her personality, impulses, and responses to her triggers and catalyzes an insidious pattern of weaponizing the grief of strangers to murder men that resemble her attacker.
The reveal of Ruth’s duplicity and violence positions her as the villain of the novel, which functions as a kind of red herring, suggesting that, in her trauma, Ruth has become her attacker—evoking a hunted-turned-hunter trope. However, in framing her actions as a response to her traumatic experiences, Cavanagh lays the groundwork for the final reveal that Billy Cameron is Mr. Blue Eyes, subverting readers’ expectations for the novel’s villain. In the final section of the novel, Cavanagh consistently represents Billy as a protector, saving Amanda from capture by Hernandez and twice suggesting that she allow him to handle Ruth personally. The author depicts him as a comforting father figure, as when he shelters Amanda and prepares her breakfast. Amanda notices that “having someone around, someone to look after, had lifted his spirits” and repeatedly calls Billy a “good man” (301, 304, 305). She finds herself “relaxing into the leather seat” of his car (304) as they drive around New York looking for Ruth. Cavanagh utilizes these repeated references to Amanda’s sense of comfort with Billy to distract readers from his true identity—the serial killer known as Mr. Blue Eyes.
During the reveal of Billy as Mr. Blue Eyes, Cavanagh transforms his characterization of the villain’s voice and mannerisms from nonthreatening to deeply sinister, indicating a calculated menace that underscores the novel’s thematic exploration of The Rehabilitation of Violent Offenders. In Chapter 63, Billy’s tone of speech changes dramatically during his confrontation with Ruth. As Billy, he speaks with a quiet, folksy tone, telling Amanda that he’s “an Eagles man” and joking about the poor quality of his home cooking (310). As Mr. Blue Eyes, his speech patterns shift, becoming much more formal and expressive, as when he tells Ruth that “an old shark like me favors familiar waters for their feeding grounds” (328). He suggests in a detached tone that it’s “a pity” that he has to kill Ruth, calling her “a very fine monster” (329). Whereas Cavanagh characterized Billy by his protective nature, Mr. Blue Eyes’s defining trait is his obsession with “the pleasure” of killing (329). The sharp differences in tone and characterization between Billy and Mr. Blue Eyes allow Cavanagh to hide his final reveal in plain sight.
