Kill Yours, Kill Mine

Okay, talk about a page turner!!!
This is a tense, pulsing and utterly gripping and I raced through it.
At first, I had a difficult time keeping up with all the characters names, and definitely felt that some had more airtime than others, which made it hard to connect with all the women.
The Sydney setting was cool, and totally reinforces that horrific domestic violence statistics in this country.
Easily one of those morally grey novels.
Are the characters motivated by justice or revenge? Each of them believes the are protecting the other and future victims.
The police investigation was just far enough removed to not over take the main storyline of the novel, but to still seem realistic and I would absolutely recommend this

“Naomi, tell me everything you can about the man I’m going to kill.”
Kill Yours, Kill Mine is the first stand-alone novel by award-winning Australian author, Katherine Kovacic. Since her footballer brother-in-law, Malik murdered her older sister, then got off with a suspended sentence, Naomi has been seeing therapists to try to come to terms with Jo’s death. The Pleiades, the practice Mia DeVries runs, is the first one that seems to have helped at all. When Mia suggests group therapy, Naomi reluctantly attends.

She soon discovers that the five women she meets have more in common with her than she could ever have imagined: a support group for the sisters of domestic violence murder victims is the last thing she expected. “She heard herself in their words, saw her fury and frustration reflected in every face. These women didn’t just understand her, they were her.” When they share their plan, she’s shocked, but unable to reject the idea.

Each of them needs justice for their sister: “They wanted to remove six blights from the earth, and swap targets so there would be no trail. Targets, not victims – the only victims were the sisters, along with their families and friends living each day with the knowledge of how they died and how little their deaths seemed to matter to everyone else.”

All the women suffer survivor guilt as well as the frustration of not having been able to save their sisters. But their motivation is not just revenge: removing these monsters from the planet so they can’t harm anyone else rates just as high. They prepare: they make plans, allocate targets, and offer each other expertise in achieving their aims, and knowing their targets.

And then, very much under the radar, they embark on their audacious scheme. Not quite everything goes to plan, but men die, in what seem to be unfortunate accidents. In all their careful planning, their burner phones, long intervals between kills and clandestine meetings, however, they haven’t reckoned with Detective Senior Sergeant Fiona Ulbrick. Fiona worked hard to get one of those men charged with murder, and is angry and discouraged when he is released after just a few years in prison.

She keeps a private file on him, just in case he pops up in another domestic violence situation. And then begins keeping notes on other offenders who escaped incarceration in the same situation. So when her initial offender is in the news due to his accidental death, her interest is piqued. Even moreso when another man on her list suffers a fatal accident.

But there’s nothing suspicious, no links to possibly disgruntled survivors. Eventually, she’s making a new list, of domestic violence perpetrators with fatally bad luck: DIY mishap, drowning, overdose, car crash. She spends far too much time on it, but has she finally found a connection?

It’s not often that a reader will find themselves anxiously wondering if a vigilante killer will succeed, perhaps even cheering them on, but Kovacic’s exploration of the potential actions of those seeking closure when left behind after domestic violence reaches its most tragic conclusion, may find themselves doing just that. This is a heart-thumping, nail-biting page-turner.
This unbiased review is from an uncorrected proof copy provided by NetGalley and Poisoned Pen Press