Haven't Killed in Years

by Amy K. Green ★★★★★

Gwen Tanner is going about her boring, nondescript life as she always does. She's taken great pains to keep things simple and contained: she has no close friends or family, an entry level job that allows her to remain mostly unnoticed, and while she might go on a date here or there, she spends most of her leisure time at Painting Pots, elbows deep in clay. Her simple status quo is interrupted, however, when she returns home one day to find a box:

"There was no label. It wasn't even properly sealed; the flaps were folded into each other without any adhesive. Through the cracks, I could make out one of those Trader Joe's newspapers. I undid a flap and the rest fell open.

I lifted the newspaper and revealed my gift, a man's left arm—hairy, colorless, severed right below the elbow. Wedged between the thumb and forefinger of his stiff hand was a tiny note card, the kind that comes with a bouquet of flowers, which simply read Hi, Marin."

That was a problem, because once upon a time Gwen was Marin. Marin Haggerty, to be precise, the only daughter of Abel Haggerty, a famed serial killer currently serving a life sentence for the murder of (at least) eight people. He was finally caught when Marin was nine, and while she was whisked away into anonymous foster care and her identity buried, she was well-aware of his crimes ("I'd been young, but I had very vivid memories"). She also wasn't fully horrified by his behavior. "I had watched him kill so many times—more than what he was charged with, by the way. It wasn't upsetting or shocking. It was all I knew and it had been happening since before I could form memories. It was our little secret, because I was special too, like him...it was pretty obvious that it (murder) didn't bother me like it should, but my indifference wasn't something I was proud of, just something I had to hide."

Now, twenty years later, someone has somehow connected the dots, and Marin's unbothered existence as Gwen is at risk. When another arm shows up, Gwen/Marin must track down who's behind the threats in order to preserve her anonymity. Along the way, she starts to break her first rule and form some actual friendships—initially with one of the workers at Painted Pots and later with a tour guide running macabre tours of her father's old haunts—and as she begins to care about these newfound friends she realizes that might make them a target for her stalker to kill.

I didn't know what to expect from this quirky take on a mystery, and I was consistently and pleasantly surprised. It's bizarre and nonchalant when discussing murder and death. In one notable childhood memory, Marin recalls an outing with her father:

"I remembered a night he took me into the city to go skating at the Frog Pond. It was freezing and I had to wear these big dopey mittens that slipped off any time I put my hands down. He held my hand and we went around the rink maybe a hundred times. Afterward, we went to dinner and I ordered a strawberry milk shake and chicken fingers that I couldn't finish. We took an indirect route back to the car and I watched my father suffocate a homeless man with the plastic bag from my leftovers."

It could be off-putting, but Marin's full self-awareness somehow makes it okay. It's also laugh-out-loud funny at times, unexpectedly so. Its unseriousness helps to keep it from ever becoming overly dark or particularly disturbing, which given the subject matter is no small task. Blend it all together, and it just worked for me. To put it in broader context, the tone is most closely reminiscent of Jeff Lindsay's Dexter books—somehow gruesome and funny at the same time.

The mystery is interesting and multi-layered, and like with other books near the top of the genre, there are several believable outcomes along the way before a satisfying payoff. Despite Marin's deficiencies, she's still imminently likable, and you root for her even though she's broken. I was not expecting to like this one as much as I did, but it kept me coming back and I devoured it in just a few days. Fresh, different, and worth your time—a bizarre but enjoyable read.