Please note that I received this book via NetGalley. This did not impact my rating or review.
I have to say that parts of this story didn’t really work such as the unknown narrator ending each excerpt with ‘when I kill you’, and the lack of chemistry between Nell and Alex. That said, I couldn’t put it down. I won’t lie though, I started to just skim the excerpts by the unknown narrator because I was tired of them.
When I Kill You follows a woman named Nell who has a past she does not talk about. It takes a while to get there, but we find out in the Elle chapters labeled “Elle: Past” that Elle was happily in love with her boyfriend Jaz, and then one nights he sees a teenage girl who gets her phone snatched. Elle goes out and sees the man face who drives her away. Days later the girl she saw is found dead and Elle believes she knows the man that did it. She quickly reports this to the police and finds herself obsessing over the man and him getting away with murder. “Nell: Present” shows us Elle years later and who has kept herself apart from forming friendships or a relationship, until she meets a man named Alex that she is in love with and wants to have a future with. One issue is that Nell thinks she’s being stalked due to her actions when she was Elle and is scared to let Alex or anyone else know. In between those before and afters we also get extracts from notebooks written by an unknown person who is following Nell and is planning on killing her.
I really found Elle aggravating, but I think Paris wrote her that way on purpose. Her insistence on someone being a murder and doing her amaetur investigating really was a send-up I thought of tons of thrillers out there with the main character being a woman and somehow smarter than the police. Paris also does a great job of showing the para-social relationship people like Elle have with the police and the suspects. Heck, I see it now with so called true-crime people on social media. They will hound someone to death trying to accuse them of being murders not based on any evidence. To this day, I still shake my head on the real life people who keep hounding people connected to the Watts Family murders because they are insistent the police let someone get away with murder. Don’t get me started on the terribleness still going on with the Idaho Four cases. We don’t get a lot of details about this case but when we jump back to Nell in the present, she still thinks she was correct and woo boy I won’t get into spoilers, but I was at one point wishing she would get murdered because she was just kind of awful.
The other characters we get details on, but there’s not much there. I also had to call BS on Nell and Alex. She is dating a guy that is only around for about a week a month and they have been dating 5 months, I didn’t buy them being loved up at all. And Nell having no sense about Googling the guy but being angry that he has been hiding things from her (yeah, pot kettle) was kind of hilarious.
The flow of the book was quite good. I found myself anxious to get back to the Elle portions to find out what in the world did happen more than 10 years ago and how it tied to Nell’s present.
The ending though I thought was kind of a cop-out. I just think it wrapped too neatly and I wish again there had been some revelations for Nell that she had the worst instincts ever about everything.