Killer Potential by Hannah Deitch
“I was once a famous murderess. I killed a wealthy family, Manson-style, and then I went on the run. But my thing wasn’t about starting a race war to reach the land of milk and honey or secretly wanting to be a Beatle. According to the news, I was just another fame-hungry killer, desperate to carve my face on the Mount Rushmore of great American psychopaths.
“It isn’t true, but still: the former-murderess thing is a fun line. I’ve thought about sticking it in a dating app bio.”
The speaker in Hannah Deitch’s audacious, riotous Killer Potential is Evie Gordon, a whip-smart, up-from-poverty, drowning-in-debt PhD dropout reduced to working as an SAT tutor to the super-rich. “You have so much potential… I’ve heard that line my entire life.”
Yeah, well, not so much now — especially the day she arrives at her latest client’s big house to find both of her client’s parents brutally murdered, and a girl tied up and bloodied in a small room under the staircase. “Help,” the girl says. “Please.”
Evie’s just gotten her free, when the 17-year-old client, Serena, walks through the door, sees the carnage, assumes the worst, and attacks Evie. Defending herself, Evie may just have sort of accidentally, kind of, um, killed Serena, with a vase to the head. Hysterical, she is grabbed by the mystery girl, who hauls her outside, grabs her car keys, and gets them on the road. “’ Where are we going?’ I asked. We. That’s how fast the decision was made.”
And just like that, they become the subjects of a manhunt, their faces plastered on the news. For days, the mystery girl refuses to speak, beyond those initial two words, and seems disturbingly adept at stealing cars and IDs — but she’s the only one Evie can cling to, as they race across America, two desperados on the run, finding themselves, finding each other, two girls who rose from nothing on brain power alone and now discovering the world to be much colder than they’d imagined.
But just when you think you’ve figured this book out as one of those Thelma-and-Louise, Bonnie-and-Bonnie, American-dream-gone-bad epics, the author turns the whole story on its head. I’m not going to tell you what happens. Suffice it to say that they have many, many surprises ahead of them, as does the reader. Around every corner is a twist; after every assumption is a revelation.
“I’d always clung to the idea that I was good,” says Evie at one point. “That being good or evil were stable identities… But taking a life was not hypothetical. You either do it or you don’t. And until you’re there, and the knife is in your hand… you don’t know. You don’t know.”
We all have killer potential.
A novel that’ll alternately have you gasping and laughing, Killer Potential is a true original.
“I got the idea when I was in a pretty dark place,” says the author. “I was working a pretty demanding full-time job (my very first non-gig work in my adult life!) and finding that unfortunately it hadn’t really changed my financial situation much. I was struggling to make rent and realizing that I needed to take on additional work. Since I worked as an SAT tutor for so many years, I figured it would be pretty easy to get hired again, even though I’d been out of the game for about 3 years at that point and now had a couple master’s degrees under my belt and a salaried job. I’d spent all of my undergrad years and the years immediately after supporting myself through SAT tutoring. The prospect of returning to tutoring during this period, when I thought I’d finally escaped it for good…
“I donated generously from my own biography with Evie, in terms of grappling with my own socioeconomic anxieties and anger. I think what became exciting, though, is that once she was on the road and entering the stage of the story that’s obviously so outside of anything I’ve ever experienced — fortunately I’ve never been accused of murder and been forced to become a fugitive — it felt like she really emerged as something completely separate.
“The initial idea felt pretty complete: I think that’s what was so exciting to me about it. From the very beginning, I knew the answer to the whodunit and the basics behind the motivation, and I knew what I wanted the relationship between our two main characters to look like. I’m not an outliner, but I like to at least know the big fundamentals before I start writing. The rest I discovered as I went.
“I don’t like to over-determine anything too much, so I work chronologically, scene by scene, sentence by sentence. For me, that’s the only way to get the ‘flow’ feeling right, so the story can build in a natural way towards its climaxes and conclusions, breathing and ramping up in the right places, with the right levels of intensity. That’s also why I don’t outline, but around the 10,000-word mark, I will start looking ahead and very loosely sketching out the following acts, but I’m not precious about these plans. I re-read and edit as I go. I like to write in the morning, and then in the late afternoon I’ll go for a long run, which is usually when I do some plotting/thinking about what I’ve written or what’s ahead (and I make a lot of playlists and listen to these when I run and drive).”
She also had some help: “YouTube is amazing. I watched tons of travel vlogs for the places I hadn’t visited. The main route they take on I-10 I’ve road-tripped a few times, but I’ve only been to the Pacific Northwest twice. But through YouTube, I was able to get pretty specific details and texture where I needed them. Sometimes if it was convenient (and affordable), I visited places myself. Also, I watched a ton of carjacking tutorials: you would be shocked at how easy it is to learn how to steal a car just from YouTube or TikTok. And I know a lot about Canadian drug routes. I wouldn’t be surprised if I’m now on some FBI watchlists…”
She also drew inspiration from her students — but not the ones she tutored: “I was a TA, in addition to being a PhD student in English. In the UC system, like a lot of public universities, most teaching responsibilities fall on PhD students. As far as teaching, we taught the composition classes that every non-humanities undergraduate has to take, usually their freshman year. I taught this really funky class where we read a bunch of George Saunders short stories. Many of my students were first-gen college students, ESL students, or working part-time or full-time on top of school. I loved teaching those stories, because they’re about labor conditions and dystopian capitalism, but they’re very funny and accessible, and it was amazing to see these students reflecting on their own class position or labor, often for the first time, or just with a new vocabulary or lens. It was such a refreshing change from the other kind of teaching I’d done for so many years — helping mostly very wealthy students improve their SAT math scores. I thought about that often when I was writing the book.”
You mean, when you were one of what Evie refers to as “fellow con artists peddling horseshit for rent money”?
“Definitely. I never had a tutor myself, so I didn’t know much about the industry when I started working as one. The deeper into the job I got, the clearer it was that it’s just a giant scam. The SAT is extremely hackable: that’s why there’s such a robust tutoring industry around it. If you have 10-20 hours to spend learning all the patterns behind the math and writing questions, you’re going to improve, whether you’re paying someone an absurd amount of money, or you just buy a prep book and do it yourself. I think a lot of students feel like it’s essential to have a tutor because it’s so commonplace in a lot of those elite circles. Sure, it’s obviously easier to improve if you have an ‘expert’ there to correct your mistakes and keep you accountable. But the amount of money families are spending is completely absurd — and more important, unfair, because it’s giving them such a ridiculous advantage over the majority of students who can’t afford to pay hundreds of dollars an hour.”
Speaking of industries that can sometimes be absurd, what was her experience trying to get published like? Obviously, it had a happy ending – because here she is! – but often it’s a bumpy road. She’s happy to share:
“Mine’s definitely more on the pitfall-laden odyssey side of things, I would say. I was working on a different novel for about 3 years, that was very different from Killer Potential. With that project, I tried and failed to get an agent a couple times, and then eventually succeeded in late 2019. We didn’t sell that novel, and then the pandemic hit. I wrote another novel in 2020, which that agent didn’t like, so I revised it, but I was still getting some unenthusiastic feedback. At this point I was feeling pretty low about my chances of ever getting published — this was during the full-time job toiling and the prospect of returning to the SAT — and I got the idea for Killer Potential. I wrote the first draft pretty quickly and sent it to her in early spring of 2022. And she didn’t like it at all.
“So… I left her. It was tough, because it had taken me 3 years to finally land an agent, and the idea of losing that safety net was pretty scary. I don’t have any publishing connections at all, and I don’t have any professional authors in my social circle. I was just relying on cold querying, which is a tough way to get an agent. The chances are incredibly slim. I’d done it once and it felt incredibly unlikely that I’d be able to do it again. But at that point, I had two novels under my belt that I’d worked really hard on, that I loved and believed in, and I wanted to give them a chance before I shelved them and tried to come up with yet another idea (and what if I went through that whole process again, for another year, and was still met with less-than-enthusiasm?).
“In late summer of 2022, I did a bunch of research on agents and sent out a new round of queries. And on my birthday — no joke, my literal birthday — I got an email from my number-one choice that she wanted to meet and chat. Some wildest-dream-come-true stuff, honestly. It was not a difficult decision at all to go with her. We revised together after the holidays and submitted to editors in February, and there was an auction and a bunch of other things that honestly even now my brain hasn’t fully processed. At one point I remember literally Googling “how to accept good news.” I’m still not sure it’s all real, to be honest.”
It’s very real. Killer Potential was bought in a 16-way North American auction, and, as of this writing, it’s been sold in 18 territories. And there’s TV news! Universal Television and Fierce Baby Productions bought it, with Deitch to co-write. She’s working on the next book, too: “A satanic panic novel that’s very, very loosely inspired by the West Memphis Three, but set in the early 2000s in a small mountain town in Georgia, which is where I grew up. Basically, three misfit teenagers get accused of a terrible murder. It’s about high school and modern-day witch hunts. And it’s very gay.”
Sounds like it’s got killer potential.
Hannah Deitch is a former SAT tutor with an M.A. in English from UC Irvine, where she studied Marxist theory and contemporary pop culture. A former arts magazine editor, she holds an M.A. in journalism from USC. Her work has appeared in the Los Angeles Times, LA Weekly and the Los Angeles Review of Books. She currently lives in Los Angeles.
Publish Date: 3/18/2025
Genre: Fiction, Mystery, Suspense, Thrillers
Author: Hannah Deitch
Page Count: 320 pages
Publisher: William Morrow
ISBN: 9780063356481
