Identical triplets Moody, Iris and Sissy often fall in love--rather, in like or just interested--but Ren DeStefano's amusingly dark, character-driven How I'll Kill You is no romance, unless it was written by a praying mantis. The triplets are serial killers who seduce men before killing them and then disposing of their bodies. Moody and Iris have dispatched three men each, but Sissy hasn't yet become a murderer; instead, she's been on cleanup duty. They've had a "clean streak," getting away with murder across the country before settling in small, "unremarkable" Rainwood, Ariz. The 25-year-old sisters decide this is where Sissy will have her first kill. Sissy chooses Edison, a 29-year-old churchgoer still grieving his wife's death. But Sissy breaks her twisted sisters' main rule: she falls in love with Edison and wants a life with him--not his death.
DeStefano, who writes YA novels as Lauren DeStefano (Wither; The Glass Spare), gives this delicious black comedy a poignant backstory, explaining what led the sisters to this career path. Abandoned at birth by their anonymous mother, they were separated while shuffled around various abusive foster homes. The triplets, unloved except by each other, exact their revenge on the world, in their distinctive way, for past grievances. DeStefano--who cleverly shows how the murderous sisters hide in plain sight and work as masters of disguise, sometimes pretending to be twins to establish alibis--delivers an original plot in How I'll Kill You. --Oline H. Cogdill, freelance reviewer