Book Review: Killer Personality

Reviewed by Jadidsa Perez

A love story turns deadly in this satisfying femme fatale thriller.

Kevin Mathers is a regular 30-year-old guy living in the city of brotherly love: Philadelphia. With all the city has to offer, Kevin still prefers to visit the Living Room Grill, a restaurant owned by his friend, Dmitri.

On an otherwise painstakingly average day, he locks eyes with a beautiful, blue-eyed woman named Olivia, who creates a major upheaval in his life. Her beauty and intelligence begin to tint Kevin’s view as he falls further and further in love with her.

It isn’t until Kevin introduces Olivia to his best friend Gary, who works as a police officer and has just become a father to a newborn, that the tinted view begins to turn red. Gary is found dead the next day, and the Olivia whom Kevin is in love with disappears. Armed with Olivia’s childhood diary and his conflicting feelings of anger and adoration, Kevin sets out to find out who Olivia truly is and discover how many bodies lie in her wake.

Killer Personality has a narrative that spins together a cohesive web, ready to trap any reader into its compelling plot. Although there are a lot of different points of view and perspectives, the details are tied together into a cool mystery that it pays off. The victims and the reasoning for Olivia’s odd behavior (like talking to a deteriorating skeleton) makes more and more sense as time goes on.

Author Steven Fisher does such an excellent job of expanding and dissecting Olivia as a character—both as a perpetrator of multiple crimes and a victim of a horrible childhood. Olivia is brought to the page with depth and complexity, a must for a book centering on the little-often heard female serial killer. While her motivation for love and the affection of men initially come off as cliché, her dismembered past, coming up sporadically, adds layers to it. Her apathetic killer persona ends up complementing Kevin’s more emotional perspective, subverting tropes in a really interesting way.

Some characters repeat plot points a little too often, which can slow down the usually speedy reading experience, but luckily, the action is almost always right around the corner to pick it back up again. All in all, Killer Personality is lifted by its killer qualities: a new perspective, a fantastic villain, a multilayered mystery.

Thriller readers will be glad to have found this action-packed quest for justice.

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