My Untitled Secret: A Guest Post by Hannah Deitch
An SAT tutor becomes a fugitive within moments in this breakneck thriller from a debut author. Hannah Deitch has penned an exclusive essay for us on what inspired her to write Killer Potential and how she balanced work with writing, down below.
Hardcover
$25.99
$28.99
Killer Potential: A Novel
Killer Potential: A Novel
In Stock Online
Hardcover
$25.99
$28.99
Darkly funny and provocative, this edge-of-your-seat thrill ride follows two unlikely fugitives—an SAT tutor who finds her rich employers brutally murdered and the bound woman she frees from their mansion—an irresistible debut novel perfect for fans of The Guest and My Sister, the Serial Killer
Darkly funny and provocative, this edge-of-your-seat thrill ride follows two unlikely fugitives—an SAT tutor who finds her rich employers brutally murdered and the bound woman she frees from their mansion—an irresistible debut novel perfect for fans of The Guest and My Sister, the Serial Killer
Killer Potential is about two fugitives at the center of a bloodthirsty nationwide manhunt. An SAT tutor named Evie Gordon shows up to work her Sunday shift instructing the privileged daughter of an ultra-wealthy LA family, and instead stumbles into a nightmare: the freshly mutilated dead bodies of her student’s parents, and a kidnapped woman locked in a closet. Evie and the hostage’s discovery at the crime scene catapults them into a split-second decision. Do they wait for their inevitable arrest and life sentencing, or do they run? Evie and her mysterious new companion choose the latter. They hit the open road. They jack cars and steal food. They stage home invasions and wield weapons. They draw blood. Overnight, an overworked SAT tutor struggling to make rent and pay off her student loan debt is now the face of every television screen, with a hefty price tag levied for her capture. A week ago, she was a burnout millennial facing the detritus of her former gifted-student dreams. Now she’s the most dangerous woman in America.
This novel is many things: a murder mystery, an unlikely love story, an outlaw thriller, but it is perhaps first and foremost a novel about work. More accurately, about becoming unburdened from work. During the months I wrote the first draft, living as a dangerous outlaw on the open road was an appealing escapist fantasy. I was a debt-burdened employee working sixty-plus hours a week in a job I hated, with multiple Master’s degrees, virtually zero savings, and a closet-sized studio apartment that I could barely afford. To supplement my crappy tech wages, I started toying with the prospect of a second job. I knew it would have to be flexible gig work I could squeeze in at the end of a ten-hour work day, or on the weekends. It would have to be something I was already deeply experienced in.
The epiphany landed like an anvil in a kid’s cartoon: SAT tutoring. Of course it had come to that. I was a tutor for almost eight years. I’ve tutored the SAT, the ACT, nearly every AP class and niche subject test. I’ve taught writing classes and after-school prep. I’ve tutored kids in their Upper West Side penthouses, their lakeside McMansions, their Malibu dream homes. It was a job I thought I’d left behind for good. Surely multiple grad school stints and a full-time tech job exempted me from the gig work I relied on to get by in my early twenties.
But of course I wasn’t exempted. Juggling multiple underpaid jobs is the reality of most people in this country. Writing this novel opened a trapdoor, a gallows-humor escape valve into a nihilistic fantasy of the open road. A life of crime and hedonism. A life free from cruel bosses and landlords, loan lenders and debt. A life without groveling or a picket-fenced script. A life without a fence at all. Back then, the novel was my untitled secret, tended to whenever I could grab an hour after work or on weekends. Little did I know then, this manuscript I kept hidden in a drawer would completely change my life. I don’t know what’s more surprising: that my novel—once cheekily titled “Be Gay, Do Crime,” a mission statement that still rings true—is going to be on bookshelves, or that something good managed to come out of all those years tutoring rich kids.