Werlin, Nancy. The Killer’s Cousin. New York: Delacorte Press. 1998. ISBN 0385325606
AWARDS:
1999 Edgar award winner.
American Library Association "Best of the Best: Best 100 YA books of the Past 10 Years selection, 2005.
ALA Best Book for Young Adults
ALA Quick Pick—Top 10
ALA Teens' Top 10 Best Book Pick
Booklist Editor's Choice
SUMMARY: After being acquitted of murdering his girlfriend in a freak accident, David Yaffe leaves Baltimore to go live with his distant Uncle Vic and his family in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Uncle Vic’s family includes his wife Julia, a dead daughter, Kathy, and 13 year old Lily. David is to attend a private school there to escape all the publicity about him in Baltimore. The uncle’s family is not happy to have David living with them.
From the moment he moves in, he is met with intense hostility by Lily. Everyone else eventually warms up to David. He feels that Kathy’s ghost is haunting him and wanting him to help Lily. He sees her ghost and hears strange noises. Eventually, he comes to realize that Lily killed her sister Kathy. Finally, Lily admits that she did kill Kathy. He tries to force Vic and Julia to get Lily help, but they think he is the one who needs help and ask him to leave. After David leaves, Lily tries to kill herself in a fire, but David rescues her. They vow that they will help each other because only they truly understand what they have gone through.
CRITICAL ANALYSIS: The story is part mystery, but also contains elements of the supernatural. We want to find out what really happened to David’s girlfriend, as well as what really happened to Kathy, his cousin. The story is told from David’s point of view. As David’s character develops, we begin to feel sympathy for his situation. His parents are stereotypical parents who get their son out of a situation and then shield him from the backlash that comes with being acquitted of murder, by sending him away. We never really understand what is behind his Aunt Julia’s hostility toward David and his family. Vic, the uncle, is sympathetic as well. He is obviously the one who pushed for David to move in with the family and he tries to bond with David. Lily’s character is a mystery to me. She has no redeeming traits, and it easy to imagine her as a killer. I had no sympathy for her, yet at the end, after being the villain through the whole story, it seemed that the author wanted her to be a victim as well.
The setting is unimportant to the story. It could have been any town in America. The new high school David attends is not significant to the story, except that it is a private school. His change from public to private school is most likely to shield him from the media and public ridicule.
The plot contains elements of a mystery story. The six essential rules introduced by Hillary Waugh are present. This mystery type seems to follow “The Amateur Detective” classification. David has insight that no one else in the story seems to have. He is the only one who thinks that Lily is evil. The story also contains elements of the supernatural, as David lives in his dead cousin Kathy’s room . He sees shadows, hears noises, and also hears Kathy’s voice telling him to “Help Lily.” Lily is so mean to David it is unrealistic to me that he would ever feel anything but contempt for her. Yet, it seems that he bonds with her in the end. I enjoyed the story and found it addicting, but the ending was hard to believe.
It is well written and and packed with suspense. I would recommend it to teenage boys or girls. It is a great read for reluctant readers.
REVIEWS:
School Library Journal:
“David Yaffe, 18, having recently been acquitted of murdering his girlfriend, is sent to live in Cambridge, MA, with his aunt Julia, uncle Vic, and cousin Lily to repeat his senior year of high school. Lily, 11, is resentful of his presence; she feels that her dead sister Kathy's room is rightfully hers, and that he should not be staying in it. Lily taunts and torments David until he begins to doubt his own sanity. His emotional fragility is compellingly revealed as he works through the loss of his girlfriend and the complicity he feels over her death. Readers see Lily through David's eyes; she is alternately depicted as the troubled child of dysfunctional parents, a spoiled brat, and a truly evil character. She plays on his fears and pushes David to the edge until he realizes what he has always known: that she, too, is a killer. This psychological thriller will keep readers involved and should appeal to fans of Lois Duncan and Joan Lowery Nixon.”
Booklist Review:
“In this utterly terrifying psychodrama, a teenager already laboring under a crushing load of guilt finds himself cleverly, relentlessly stalked by his 11-year-old cousin. David killed his lover. The fact that it was accidental and that he's been acquitted of her murder, matters to him not at all. To finish high school and perhaps find a way to live with himself, he moves away from home to stay with Massachusetts relatives, where, in an attic apartment that may be haunted, he lives above a family driven seriously dysfunctional by a daughter's apparent suicide four years before. His hosts' remaining daughter, Lily, greets him coldly and starts a campaign of surreptitious harassment designed to enrage him beyond control. Why? Powerless to stop her and unable to make her parents believe that she needs help, David hangs on grimly, meanwhile trying to fit in at a new school and finding there an unexpected friend. Positioning her characters in an intricate, shadowy web of secrets, deception, bad choices, family feuds, and ghostly warnings, Werlin winds the tension to an excruciating point, then releases it in a fiery climax: realizing in the nick of time that he's not the only killer in the family, David races into a burning house to save Lily from suicide, then promises her that she won't be alone with her anguish any longer. With this tautly plotted thriller, rich in complex, finely drawn characters, Werlin more than fulfills the promise of her first novel, Are You Alone on Purpose?”
RESOURCES:
Werlin, Nancy. The Killer’s Cousin. New York: Delacorte Press. 1998.
Nancy Werlin Website
Harper Collins, Canada website. Interview with Nancy Werlin.
Image by Google Images.
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