April showers, flowers blooming, there’s love and murder in the air in this next book. And the drama is juicy, let me tell you. I really enjoyed reading this book. I think this is the fastest I’ve ever finished a book. I was locked in with every page and I know you guys will be too! This month we sunk our teeth into How I’ll Kill You by Ren DeStefano. This book was published by Berkley on March 21st, 2023. It’s a psychological thriller about Identical triplets who spend their time traveling across the country, sight seeing, and oh, murdering their boyfriends once they fall in love with them. Iris, Moody, and Sissy are each lethal in their own way. Iris and Moody have already killed a handful of men. Now it’s Sissy’s turn to partake in their family business. It’s her first kill and she wants it to be perfect in every way. She’s spent years cleaning up after her sister’s murders and now it’s time for her to make her own mess. The triplets find themselves in Arizona where Sissy has found her perfect mark – Edison, a recovering alcoholic who lost his wife in a tragic accident a year ago. Sissy soon finds herself in over her head after she falls in love with Edison, now she has to decide between her sisters and her newfound love. So let’s get into the thick of it!
I wanna start off by saying that I completely devoured this book. It’s told from Sissy’s point of view as she navigates her way through this situation. Out of the three of them, she’s the most stable one ironically. She’s calm and collected, when shit needs to get done she locks in no matter how she’s feeling or what’s going on. There’s a scene midway through the book where Sissy just got home after getting into a car accident and finding out some world rocking information (I’m not gonna spoil everything now lol) and she immediately has to help her neighbor Dara cover up “an accident” if you know what I mean. The way she assesses the situation, takes a deep breath, and locks in to clean this mess while also keeping Dara from falling apart is utterly insane to me. Like it’s late, almost morning late, and this is what she finds herself doing after the day she’s had with a concussion. It’s nothing she’s hasn’t done before but now it holds a whole new weight after receiving this news. She didn’t panic, snap at Dara, or anything. It was almost robotic at how automatic and precise she was. That gave me a little respect for Sissy – by this point in the book, I’m still trying to figure out how I feel about her. She’s a liar, manipulator, she’s covered up countless murders and now she is plotting one of her own. But her neighbor and friend was in trouble and she dropped all that to be everything Dara needed. I don’t know, that may seem like a small thing but she was doing this act out of compassion and love for her friend. It didn’t feel the same way as she did it for her sisters earlier in the book. I would say that Dara is the heart of this book for Sissy and not Edison. She meets Edison after already stalking him and planning his murder. Dara was the neighbor she wasn’t expecting to like or form a connection with. This is the turning point for Sissy I would say. She finds out this huge information, helps Dara with this, now she finds herself questioning everything she’s doing. Yes she was starting to fall for Edison at this point but taking care of Dara gave her time to focus on something else other than this plan her sisters put onto her.
The relationship between Edison and Sissy (or Jade, her fake name) gets mixed feelings from me. The character of Edison is interesting, he’s this normal nice guy who goes to church, he’s grieving his wife while working on his sobriety everyday. He’s compassionate, tender, respectful, everything you want in a good friend/boyfriend. But just like Sissy, he has this hidden dark side that he tries to ignore with everything in him. Meeting Jade slowly starts to bring that to the surface in small ways. He relapses early after we meet him due to his grief and he starts opening up to Sissy about how he really feels. He misses his wife, he hates the guy who he says “murdered” her, then reveals to her that he often finds himself sitting outside the man’s house mentally picturing all the ways he’ll murder him. His dark fantasy is similar to Sissy’s as she plays in her head exactly how she plans to murder Edison. I mean she has it planned minute by minute and she visualizes it so easily whenever she and Edison share a tender moment. It’s psychotic. She romantizes his murder the same way he does the man that killed his wife and they start to bond over that darkness within them. There’s a scene later on in the book where Jade and Edison are on a hike and in the midst of a passionate moment, she looks him dead in his eyes and says “if you were to kill me, how would you do it?” LIKE WHAT!? And what’s even crazier is he answered honestly and even added an extra twisted layer to it. I’ll let you guys read what he said cause that made me put the book down for a minute. They are in a way perfect for each other but also toxic. Personally, I’m not a fan of their relationship. Edison is an alcoholic who lost his wife a year ago and he’s already finding himself in a deeply committed relationship. I just don’t feel like it’s the time for him to be doing that. Plus his wife has a daughter who Edison still cares for as well. Sadie splits her time between her biological father and her ex-stepfather. He has a lot going on. Sissy is an accomplice to multiple murders, completely mentally ill, and starts her relationship with the sole purpose to murder him and dispose of his body. I mean, it shouldn’t work out.
The relationship between Sissy, Moody, and Iris is straight emotional manipulation, trauma bonding, and illegal activity marked as the family past time. It’s completely wild but these sisters genuinely love and care about each other through it all. It’s definitely a little emotional reading Sissy’s internal/emotional battle on whether she should stick by her sister and the plan or follow her heart and build something real with Edison. Their entire lives, the only people the sisters could rely on was each other and they’ve been through so much in their lives. They were abandoned at birth, thrown around in different foster homes, often separated. They balance each other out, Moody is the emotional one, Iris is the authoritative figure who keeps the girls in check, while Sissy is the strategic one always ready to clean up a mess. That’s been the case for their entire lives and Sissy finally reaches the point where she’s tired of cleaning up her sister’s messes. She wants to live for herself and see where life takes her. Now, there’s nothing wrong with her wanting to do that. It makes sense after years of being sheltered from the world inside her bubble with her sisters. My issue with this….Sissy doesn’t deserve it. She needs to pay for her crimes and get psychological help. She’s the main character, the “protagonist” technically but she’s a villain, a predator. She has blood all on her hands even though she hasn’t killed anyone yet. As I was reading, she and Edison would have these tender moments, even moments between her and Sadie were great but I didn’t want her to end up with them. Her and sister need to pay for their crimes, their countless victims and their families deserve closure.
Now we get into the ending, I have very mixed feelings about it. Dara’s fate upsets me greatly. Iris – I have conflicting feelings about. For the majority of the book, I didn’t like her at all. She was too controlling, I didn’t like the way she talked down to Sissy at all. The belief is that Iris is the reason they started killing in the first place. So there’s buried resentment that Sissy has towards her. However, my feelings for her start to flip the other way almost instantly after a huge reveal that comes from Moody regarding Iris’s first kill that started this whole thing. I got emotional at one point as her ending was happening and it surprised me by how moved I got. Moody is kinda passive to me throughout the entire book, like she and Sissy have the better relationship and some of their moments are sweet and sisterly. Other than that, she doesn’t really move me as an individual. She’s the basic stereotype of the irrational/emotional foil. Her ending is the only one I really enjoy, it’s what she deserves but at the same time it’s also shocking at the same time given the reveal that we get. She loves her sisters deeply, she proves to be the one that would truly do anything for them. Now onto Sissy and Edison. As I’m typing this, a huge sigh just left my lips. I do not like their ending at all, I’m sorry but the lack of realism is kicking in for me here. By this point, everyone knows the truth about the triplets, Edison and his family have just gone through an awful ordeal. And the decision that Edison makes regarding Sissy blows my fucking mind quite honestly. I won’t reveal it but any reasonable and rational person will see why this being how their story ends will feel the same I believe. Despite my mixed feelings for the ending of this book, Ren wrote such a captivating and brilliant novel. She moved me emotionally many times in different ways. Being in Sissy’s head the entire way through was great. Getting a deep dive into her psyche and watching it falter between good and bad throughout was great. The dialogue for every character also stuck out to me. Each person felt real, they had different personalities and I could imagine them perfectly. It’s rare in some novels where each character feels like their own person rather than just moving pieces to the main character’s story. Even with Moody, despite her not really connecting with me emotionally – I could still picture her perfectly. This was such a well written book, I can definitely see myself reading it again down the line. I highly recommend this book to everyone! Thanks again for taking the time to read my reviews, it means a lot!
RealisticDreamer 