What Doesn't Kill Her by Max Allan Collins

Published by Thomas & Mercer on September 17, 2013

While it is written with Max Allan Collins' usual flair, What Doesn't Kill Her is a fairly ordinary revenge novel. It begins with the rape of a teenage girl and the murder of her family members (including her gay brother) by a man who rants about punishing sin and reestablishing God's natural order. The killer leaves Jordan Rivera alive because he wants her to tell his story. Ten years later, Jordan is in a mental health facility. To make sure she does not satisfy the killer's desire, Jordan has not uttered a word since her rape. That changes when she sees on the news that a family was murdered after a teenage girl in the family took another girl to the prom as her date. Are the crimes connected? Jordan intends to find out.

Cleveland Detective Mark Pryor thinks he sees a pattern in certain family murders -- killings from which one family member is spared -- but neither his boss nor the FBI agrees that the killings are related. Coincidentally, Pryor had a high school crush on Jordan before her family was murdered.

Some aspects of What Doesn't Kill Her are less than convincing -- Jordan's development as a superstar street fighter, the speculation by members of a support group that their families were all (perhaps) victimized by the same killer, Pryor's certainty that he sees a pattern in killings that are apparently unrelated -- but the plot is never so outlandish as to kill enjoyment of the story. The romance that develops (or rekindles) between Pryor and Jordan is cheesy and contrived. A plot element that is so obviously manipulative makes it difficult to invest fully in the characters. Not that I would have invested in Jordan anyway, given her one-dimensional identity as She Who Will Avenge.

The killer's present identity is well concealed until Collins drops some obvious clues several pages before the reveal. The ending is inevitable and thus predictable -- this is a revenge novel, after all -- but the path Collins follows to get there builds some tension. Collins always writes with a good sense of pace. While this isn't one of his better novels, it isn't bad. I liked it enough to recommend it (particularly to fans of revenge novels), but I wouldn't put it high on my list of recommended thrillers.

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