Kill for Me, Kill for You
As the book begins, Amanda has followed a man onto a New York subway train. She has a gun and intends to kill him. She’s certain that he’s the one who killed her young daughter and left her body, naked and defiled, in a dumpster.. Police have told Amanda they believe the man is her daughter’s killer — and that he’s killed other girls as well — but they haven’t found any evidence that would stand up in court. So Amanda has decided it’s up to her to make sure he’s stopped.
At the last minute, the man looks up and recognizes Amanda. She’s been following him for months, and he’s already taken out a restraining order against her. Amanda is arrested and charged with violating that order, though she avoids a more serious charge by slipping her gun into another passenger’s half-open golf umbrella in the subway.
But violating the restraining order is bad enough. The court orders her to attend a trauma and bereavement group for parents who have lost a child. There she meets Wendy, whose fifteen-year-old daughter was strangled, and the girl’s diary said she’d been having an affair with one of her teachers. But the police have no corroborating evidence, so can’t charge him. And, like Amanda, Wendy has been fantasizing about killing him.
So…just as in the movie, Strangers on A Train, the two women decide to trade crimes. Since each of them would be the obvious suspect if the man she believes killed her daughter is murdered, they’ll each establish an alibi while the other woman kills the other’s target.
But it’s not quite that simple. Things get complicated, and as identities and timelines shift, we’re never sure just who is doing what. Twist follows twist, leading to a highly charged conclusion. This one will keep you turning the pages for sure!
Kill for Me, Kill for You is a standalone novel, but Steve Cavanaugh is best known for a crime series featuring Eddie Flynn, a New York trial lawyer who was formerly a con man. (Cavanaugh says both occupations make use of similar skills to succeed: “distraction, manipulation, misdirection and persuasion”.)
Cavanagh was born in 1976 in Belfast, Northern Ireland, growing up in the time of the Troubles with everyday exposure to violence and risk. In a family with one parent Catholic and the other Protestant, he was an avid reader from childhood, becoming hooked on thrillers and crime novels after his mother gave him a copy of The Silence of the Lambs at age 12.
He moved to Dublin to study law at 18, then moved to Cardiff, Wales, to complete a Master of Laws. In his twenties he tried writing screenplays, but stopped when he failed to interest a producer. Returning to Belfast, he obtained his solicitor qualifications and made a name for himself as a lawyer defending several high-profile civil rights cases.
When his mother suddenly died in 2011, he decided to return to fiction writing after a hiatus of fifteen years. Though by then he had a wife and two young children and was working full-time as a lawyer, he wrote in the evenings after his family went to sleep. He finished the first draft of a novel within a year, and in 2014 had a short story, “The Grey,” published in the Belfast Noir anthology along with several other prominent Irish crime writers.
Meanwhile, after something like 40 rejections, he received offers from four publishers for his novel, which went to auction in the UK and Germany. The first volume in the Eddie Flynn series, his debut novel was published in 2015 as The Defence and became an international bestseller.
All of Cavanaugh’s novels have been nominated for major awards and are consistent international bestsellers. In 2018 the third in the Flynn series, The Liar, won the CWA Gold Dagger for Crime Novel of the year. The eighth in the series, Witness 8, was published to acclaim in 2024, and a ninth Eddie Flynn novel is in the works.
Cavanaugh has been a full-time writer since 2019. He has a wife and two children, and lives in a suburb of Belfast.
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