When a professional assassin encounters a child at a target’s house during a Christmas Eve assignment, the consequences ripple far beyond a single aborted hit. Lisa Unger’s short thriller “The Kill Clause” takes readers on a breathless journey through the moral complexities of a hired killer’s world, proving once again why she’s earned her reputation as a master of psychological suspense.
A Dark Christmas Story That Subverts Expectations
Unger opens with a clever parallel—the protagonist Paige comparing herself to Santa Claus. Both break into homes under cover of darkness. Both have lists. But where Santa brings gifts, Paige brings death. This darkly ironic framing immediately establishes the story’s tone: noir meets holiday season, moral ambiguity wrapped in twinkling lights. The juxtaposition is unsettling in the best possible way, forcing readers to sit with the uncomfortable reality that violence doesn’t take a holiday, even when the rest of the world is celebrating peace on earth.
The premise is deceptively simple. Paige, a trained assassin working for a shadowy organization called “The Company,” receives an assignment to eliminate a wealthy hedge fund manager during the holidays. But when she arrives to complete the job, she discovers the target’s four-year-old daughter unexpectedly present. This collision between professional obligation and personal conscience sets off a chain reaction that threatens to dismantle everything Paige has built—and possibly her life itself.
The Complexity of a Killer with a Conscience
What makes “The Kill Clause” compelling is Unger’s refusal to present Paige as either a cold-blooded killer or a misunderstood anti-hero seeking redemption. Instead, she’s rendered with psychological depth that feels authentic and earned. Paige is deeply flawed, capable of terrible violence, yet haunted by her choices in ways that speak to a conscience that hasn’t been entirely extinguished by her profession. She’s been shaped by profound childhood trauma—witnessing her father murder her mother—and this foundational wound colors every decision she makes.
The character work extends beyond Paige. Her ex-husband Julian, also an assassin, serves as both romantic interest and mirror, reflecting different responses to the same moral quandaries. Where Paige struggles with the weight of her actions, Julian initially appears to have compartmentalized more successfully, though Unger hints at depths beneath his surface detachment. Their relationship history, revealed through skillfully deployed flashbacks, adds emotional stakes to the present-day action.
The supporting cast, particularly Nora, Paige’s mentor and the head of The Company, is painted with economical but effective strokes. Nora emerges as a complex figure—part savior, part manipulator—who rescued damaged young people from desperate circumstances only to mold them into instruments of death. The power dynamics at play are unsettling, raising questions about exploitation, loyalty, and the nature of chosen family.
Craft and Execution: When Brevity Becomes Strength
As a short story, “The Kill Clause” demonstrates how constraint can sharpen storytelling. Unger wastes no words, moving with the efficiency of her protagonist through a tightly plotted narrative that spans only a few days but feels expansive in its emotional scope. The present-tense narration creates immediacy, pulling readers into Paige’s headspace as events unfold. We experience her racing thoughts, her physical sensations, her split-second decisions.
The structure alternates between present action and flashbacks, a technique that could easily become disjointed but instead builds psychological depth layer by layer. We learn about Paige’s recruitment, her training, her marriage to Julian, and the pivotal moments that brought her to this crisis point. These glimpses into the past inform present choices without slowing the thriller momentum. Unger understands that character development and plot advancement aren’t opposing forces but complementary elements.
The prose itself carries a noir sensibility—spare, observant, occasionally darkly humorous. Paige’s voice has the cynical edge of someone who’s seen too much, yet moments of vulnerability break through. When she encounters Apple, the target’s daughter, her internal monologue shifts, revealing the emotional wounds that her profession requires her to suppress. The writing shimmers with this tension between the professional assassin and the traumatized child she once was.
Moral Complexity and the Weight of Choice
At its thematic core, “The Kill Clause” grapples with questions of moral agency within systems designed to strip it away. Paige works for an organization that positions itself as a force for “good,” taking out targets who presumably deserve their fates. But Unger steadily undermines this comfortable rationalization. Who decides who deserves to die? What happens when following orders conflicts with personal ethics? Can someone who kills for a living claim any moral high ground?
The story explores how institutions—whether governments, corporations, or shadowy organizations—exploit vulnerable people by offering them belonging, purpose, and financial security in exchange for their humanity. Paige and her colleagues are all rescues, people with nowhere else to go, making them perfectly malleable for Nora’s purposes. This examination of systemic manipulation adds contemporary resonance to what could have been a simple action thriller.
The Christmas setting amplifies these themes. While the world celebrates love, generosity, and redemption, Paige inhabits a reality where violence is transactional and human life has a price tag. Yet the holiday also becomes a catalyst for change, a time when even assassins might glimpse the possibility of something different. The presence of Apple, wide-eyed and innocent, forces Paige to confront what she’s lost and what might still be salvageable.
Where the Story Falters
For all its strengths, “The Kill Clause” isn’t without limitations. The short story format, while generally well-handled, occasionally demands too much suspension of disbelief in service of plot momentum. Some of the action sequences, particularly the climactic confrontation, unfold with convenient timing that strains credibility. Characters appear exactly when needed for maximum dramatic impact, and certain revelations feel slightly too neat.
The world-building around The Company, while intriguing, raises questions that the story’s brevity doesn’t allow time to fully explore. How does this organization operate? Who are their clients? The vague allusions to “making wrongs right” and “fighting for progress” never quite cohere into a coherent philosophy, which may be intentional critique but leaves some readers wanting more concrete details about the systems at play.
Additionally, some supporting characters remain somewhat thinly sketched. Drake, Paige’s younger lover and colleague, serves primarily as a plot device rather than a fully realized person. His arc feels predetermined from his introduction, robbing certain late-story developments of their potential emotional impact. Similarly, Buz’s final actions, while surprising, could have been more thoroughly seeded throughout the narrative.
Unger’s Broader Body of Work
Readers familiar with Lisa Unger’s novels—including “The New Couple in 5B,” “Secluded Cabin Sleeps Six,” and “Confessions on the 7:45″—will recognize her signature exploration of morally complex characters navigating dangerous situations. She excels at psychological depth, at finding the humanity in flawed people, and at crafting suspense that’s as much internal as external. “The Kill Clause” distills these strengths into a concentrated dose.
However, those who appreciate the layered plotting and slow-burn revelations of her full-length novels might find this shorter format somewhat less satisfying. Unger’s novels allow for more intricate character development and thematic exploration. The short story demands compression, which means some of the psychological nuance that makes her longer works so compelling gets abbreviated here.
A Holiday Read Unlike Any Other
“The Kill Clause” succeeds as a dark counterpoint to cozy Christmas stories, offering readers who want something with more edge during the holiday season a compelling alternative. It’s less interested in comfort and nostalgia than in examining how people navigate impossible choices and whether redemption remains possible after terrible actions. The result is a story that lingers, prompting reflection on morality, agency, and the cost of violence—hardly typical holiday fare, but all the more memorable for its willingness to go dark.
The story works best for readers who appreciate psychological complexity in their thrillers, who don’t need their protagonists to be likable so long as they’re compelling, and who enjoy narratives that pose difficult questions without offering easy answers. It’s a quick read—consumable in a single sitting—but one that rewards a second reading to catch the careful foreshadowing and thematic threads Unger weaves throughout.
Final Thoughts: A Compact Thriller That Packs a Punch
“The Kill Clause” demonstrates Lisa Unger’s versatility as a thriller writer. Within the constraints of a short story, she delivers propulsive action, psychological depth, and moral complexity. While the format necessitates some shortcuts and leaves certain elements less developed than they might be in a full-length novel, the core experience—following a troubled protagonist through a crisis that forces confrontation with past trauma and present choices—is genuinely engaging.
This is a story about the hard places we all eventually reach, where continuing as we have becomes impossible and change, however painful, becomes necessary. It’s about the ways institutions exploit vulnerable people and the courage required to break free. Most of all, it’s about whether someone who has done terrible things can still choose differently, can still reclaim their humanity.
The answer Unger offers is cautiously hopeful, though earned through violence and loss rather than granted easily. In a genre often content with simple answers, “The Kill Clause” asks readers to sit with ambiguity, to recognize that moral reckonings are rarely clean. That commitment to complexity, even in a compact format, marks this as a worthwhile addition to Unger’s body of work and a memorable entry in the holiday thriller subgenre.
If You Enjoyed This, Try These Similar Reads:
“The Killer Inside Me” by Jim Thompson – A classic noir examination of a murderer’s psychology
“I Am Pilgrim” by Terry Hayes – For those interested in assassin tradecraft and moral complexity
“The Faithful and the Fallen” series by John Gwynne – Features characters navigating loyalty versus conscience
“A Certain Hunger” by Chelsea G. Summers – A darkly psychological thriller with a morally ambiguous protagonist
“The Sympathizer” by Viet Thanh Nguyen – Explores double agents and moral compromise in gripping fashion
“The Nowhere Man” by Gregg Hurwitz – Features an assassin seeking redemption with similar ethical questions