A Girl with Killer Potential

A Spotlight on Author Hannah Deitch

“I was once a famous murderess. I killed a wealthy family, Manson-style, and then I went on the run. But my thing wasn’t about starting a race war to reach the land of milk and honey or secretly wanting to be a Beatle. According to the news, I was just another fame-hungry killer, desperate to carve my face on the Mount Rushmore of great American psychopaths.

“It isn’t true, but still: the former-murderess thing is a fun line. I’ve thought about sticking it in a dating app bio.”

The speaker in Hannah Deitch’s audacious, riotous Killer Potential is Evie Gordon, a whip-smart, up-from-poverty, drowning-in-debt PhD dropout reduced to working as an SAT tutor to the super-rich. “You have so much potential….I’ve heard that line my entire life.” 

Yeah, well, not so much now – especially the day she arrives at her latest client’s big house to find both of her client’s parents brutally murdered, and a girl tied up and bloodied in a small room under the staircase. “Help,” the girl says. “Please.”

Evie’s just gotten her free, when the seventeen-year-old client, Serena, walks through the door, sees the carnage, assumes the worst, and attacks Evie. Defending herself, Evie may just have sort of accidentally, kind of, um, killed Serena, with a vase to the head. Hysterical, she is grabbed by the mystery girl, who hauls her outside, grabs her car keys, and gets them on the road. “’ Where are we going?’ I asked. We. That’s how fast the decision was made.”

And just like that, they become the subjects of a manhunt, their faces plastered on the news. For days, the mystery girl refuses to speak, beyond those initial two words, and seems disturbingly adept at stealing cars and IDs – but she’s the only one Evie can cling to, as they race across America, two desperados on the run, finding themselves, finding each other, two girls who rose from nothing on brain power alone and now discovering the world to be much colder than they’d imagined.

But just when you think you’ve figured this book out as one of those Thelma-and-Louise, Bonnie-and-Bonnie, American-dream-gone-bad epics, the author turns the whole story on its head. I’m not going to tell you what happens. Suffice it to say that they have many, many surprises ahead of them, as does the reader. Around every corner is a twist; after every assumption is a revelation.

“I’d always clung to the idea that I was good,” says Evie at one point. “That being good or evil were stable identities….But taking a life was not hypothetical. You either do it or you don’t. And until you’re there, and the knife is in your hand….you don’t know. You don’t know.”

We all have killer potential.

A novel that’ll alternately have you gasping and laughing, Killer Potential is a true original.

“I got the idea when I was in a pretty dark place,” says the author. “I was working a pretty demanding full-time job (my very first non-gig work in my adult life!) and finding that unfortunately it hadn’t really changed my financial situation much. I was struggling to make rent and realizing that I needed to take on additional work. Since I worked as an SAT tutor for so many years, I figured it would be pretty easy to get hired again, even though I’d been out of the game for about three years at that point and now had a couple master’s degrees under my belt and a salaried job. I’d spent all of my undergrad years and the years immediately after supporting myself through SAT tutoring. The prospect of returning to tutoring during this period, when I thought I’d finally escaped it for good….”

To read more of Neil’s review and discussion with Hannah Deitch, go here.