📚 How to Kill Men and Get Away With It
Genre: Thriller, Mystery, Crime Originally Published: 2023
💭 Quick Summary & Thoughts
I’ll be honest, I didn’t particularly enjoy this one. It’s a quick read, sure, but not a very impactful one.
The premise is interesting enough - Kitty Collins, a wealthy Instagram influencer, accidentally kills a man who tries to assault her and discovers she has a taste for vigilante justice. She starts targeting predatory men, all while maintaining her glamorous public persona. On paper, it sounds like a darkly fun ride. In practice, the execution left me frustrated.
My biggest issue is how conveniently everything works out for Kitty. She kills someone on the street, and there are no witnesses. Fine, I can digest that - it’s late at night, the guy was following her, he would’ve only approached when no one was around. But there are also no cameras? And no fingerprints? The police just close the case as a freak accident? That’s a lot of luck for one night. And then she goes and murders a guy in his house and leaves absolutely no evidence behind. These are things that professional criminals struggle to pull off, and Kitty does it with zero prior planning. It’s hard to take seriously.
And it doesn’t stop there. She keeps getting away with things like this, one coincidence after another, to the point where the story starts feeling less like a thriller and more like a fantasy. I like the feminist angle - the idea of wanting to rid the world of predators is compelling. But the way Kitty goes about it strains credibility so much that the message gets lost.
I also didn’t care for the unnecessary adult humour. It doesn’t add anything meaningful to the story, and it makes the book unreadable for a younger audience that might otherwise connect with its themes. It felt like it was trying to be edgy for the sake of being edgy.
The pacing, I’ll give credit where it’s due, is solid. The book moves fast and doesn’t drag. But speed alone can’t carry a story when the plot keeps asking you to look the other way.
⚠️ Spoiler Zone
🚨 Click to reveal spoilers 🚨
The reveal that Kitty’s friend was her stalker all along was, unfortunately, one of the most predictable twists in the book. It’s almost always one of the closest characters in these kinds of stories, and this was no exception. As soon as the stalker subplot started building, I had a pretty good idea where it was headed.
Now, the reveal that Kitty had murdered her own father? That one actually caught me off guard. It was a genuinely well-done moment and probably the strongest twist in the book. It recontextualises her character in a meaningful way, and I wish the rest of the story had more moments like it.
But here’s where the book lost me on a thematic level. After establishing that Kitty’s father was a predator, the story goes ahead and reveals that her friend’s father is also a predator. Why? What does that add? It ends up painting every wealthy man in the book as a monster, and instead of feeling like sharp social commentary, it just left me wondering what the point was. If everyone’s terrible, the message stops being about systemic issues and starts feeling like a caricature.
The book essentially portrays all rich men as jackasses, and while I understand the feminist anger driving the story, the lack of nuance undermines its own argument. A more restrained approach - showing some complexity in these characters instead of making them uniformly awful - would have made the commentary land much harder.
💬 Quote Corner
“I want to live in a world where I don’t have to keep my keys between my fingers in case I’m attacked walking home.”
“There’s still some notion that continually trying to win over a woman who has quite clearly expressed having no interest in you is romantic.”
⭐ Ratings
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