A Talent for Murder

In the present, Ethan’s list has 26 numbers on it—the first is his grandfather and the last is Martha Ratliff. Ethan considers the list to be his “life’s work, the thing of which he [is] the proudest” (130). He has a fantasy of turning himself in when he’s 75 years old to bask in the fame that will come with being a serial killer. He reveals that he currently goes by the name Robert Charnock and works as an art dealer in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Ethan, as Robert, married a woman named Rebecca Grubb, who has two children from a previous marriage.

Ethan describes his habits as a serial killer, which involve frequently changing identities and never killing two people in the same way. As a result, he has never been under investigation by the police. Though he sometimes kills people at the margins of society, he typically prefers victims with more community connections, often chosen from newspaper stories to maintain a personal distance from himself. Ethan also thinks that his kills have become boring, convinced that it’s easy to commit murder without being caught.

One day, Ethan encounters Martha Ratliff on Facebook, reigniting his old anger against her. At the time he’d known Martha, he had still only killed his grandfather and was trying to pass himself off as a writer. Back then, Ethan’s habit was to seduce “mild-mannered girls, then slowly and completely tak[e] them apart, corrupting them” (134). He found that he had the ability to manipulate these women into painful sex or even hurting other people on his behalf. Martha had been one of the subjects of these manipulations, back when Ethan worked as an adjunct professor of writing. He considered Martha easy to manipulate but became angry when a friend of hers intervened, convincing Martha to break up with him. Encountering Martha on Facebook, he feels the same rage and decides on a risky plan involving her husband, Alan, that will get him his revenge on Martha and make his kills more challenging and exciting.

The first conference that Ethan attends for the purpose of tailing Alan is a math conference in downtown Atlanta, Georgia. Observing Alan, Ethan notices that he seems abnormally interested in his female customers, speaks to random women at bars, and goes to strip clubs after work. Ethan follows Alan into a strip club but decides that he’s too visible after a few different dancers approach him. Instead, he exits the strip club and enters a chicken restaurant across the street.

Eventually, Alan leaves the strip club, and Ethan continues to follow him. Alan heads to a seedy side of town, which Ethan finds surprising. At a park, Ethan observes Alan hiring a sex worker before the two of them disappear into the darkness. Ten minutes later, Alan emerges and heads back in the direction he came. After a few more minutes, the sex worker also emerges from the darkness, and Ethan makes his way toward her.

The narrative jumps forward to Ethan’s return to Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, from his trip to Atlanta. Ethan’s wife, Rebecca, notices that he’s in a particularly good mood after his arrival, an observation that annoys Ethan deeply. That night, Ethan finds a news story reporting the murder of the sex worker whom Alan had solicited, noting that her body had been found bludgeoned to death in the park. Ethan briefly worries about whether he’s hidden his kill list too well, ensuring that nobody would discover his actions after his death. He decides to make sure that a copy of his list is placed in his safe as proof of his crimes.

Ethan starts to fantasize about how many people he can kill if he frames Alan for the murders, particularly if he follows Alan around the country on his work trips and only kills women whom Alan comes into contact with. In a moment of self-awareness, Ethan acknowledges that he’s only doing this to get back at Martha, whom Ethan considers to be “the one that got away” (143).

Ethan considers the “Peralta killings” to be some of the best times of his life so far. Following Alan from conference to conference, Ethan discovers that Alan has a pattern: First, he tries to hook up with an attendee at the conference; next, he goes to a dive bar; third, he hires a sex worker. Ethan uses this pattern to his advantage, attacking the women once they’ve finished with Alan.

As part of the game, Ethan tries several times to implicate Alan in the murders directly, including attacking a woman while Alan is in the car with her, which increases the thrill he experiences from killing his targets.

By the time Alan attends the conference in Denver, Ethan begins to tire of following him around. He decides that the most important thing is making sure that Alan gets caught and framed and, particularly, that Martha believes her husband is a serial killer. In Denver, Ethan watches as a couple of sex workers steal money from Alan at an ATM. Ethan follows the sex workers and approaches one of them once they go their separate ways, offering to purchase a cigarette from her. As she hands it to him, Ethan hits her in the head with a meat tenderizer that he’d found on the ground, killing her. He dips his hand in the woman’s blood and then approaches Alan, who’s still in the same spot where the sex workers had robbed him. Ethan wipes the blood from his hand on Alan’s shirt to further implicate him in the murders. However, Alan remains free.

The conference in Saratoga Springs rolls around, and Ethan is tired of trying to frame Alan. He decides that this will be his final Alan-related murder. However, while following Alan, he sees Lily and recognizes her as the woman who convinced Martha to break up with him all those years earlier. Ethan flees in fear, intimidated by Lily. However, an idea occurs to him in the taxi: The way to teach Lily a lesson is to murder Martha.

Lily tries to contact Martha, to no avail. Deep down, Lily knows that Martha is dead, killed by Ethan. Lily checks out of her hotel and drives to Martha’s address to check on her.

Before she enters Martha’s house, Lily puts on a baseball cap to hide her face from prying eyes. She sneaks into the house, and, hearing no response to her calls, she heads upstairs to search for Martha. She finds Martha dead in a bedroom, with blood spattered all over the walls.

Lily sneaks out of Martha’s house and considers whether she wants to call the police and report Martha’s body anonymously. She knows that it would spare Alan having to discover his wife’s corpse, but it could also compromise the investigation. Eventually, she decides to not call the police and contacts her ex-police friend, Henry Kimball, instead.

Lily meets with Henry to tell him about Martha’s death, her suspicions about Alan, and the surprising encounter with Ethan. Lily tells Henry that she suspects Ethan of being a serial murderer, but Henry is skeptical. Lily can’t find any information about Ethan and suspects that he’s changed his name. She asks Henry to help her in her search.

Lily drives to Shepaug and spends the night at her parents’ home. Henry calls to inform her that Ethan is a ghost, with no reliable public information to be found about him. However, Henry has found some information on Ethan’s family—Ethan’s brother lives on Cape Cod, and his sister lives in New Jersey. Henry heads to Cape Cod to speak to the brother, while Lily goes to New Jersey to speak with the sister.

Lily arrives in Cresskill, New Jersey, and waits outside the hair salon for Ethan’s sister to emerge. Lily approaches her in the street, giving her a false name and saying that she used to date Ethan. The woman introduces herself as Vicky and seems suspicious of Lily’s intentions.

Vicky tells her that she hasn’t been in contact with Ethan for the previous decade and that he hadn’t attended either of their parents’ funerals. When Lily claims that Ethan had been decent to her, Vicky says that, in that case, she was the only one. In a bid to get her to keep talking, Lily claims to have a child with Ethan. However, Vicky simply warns her to avoid Ethan and leaves.

Lily follows Vicky as she drives away, ending up at a single-family home on a suburban street. Looking up the address, Lily finds that the house—Ethan’s childhood home—has been sold to Vicky by her mother. When Vicky leaves, Lily breaks into the house’s basement with a flashlight. Searching around, Lily finds a yearbook featuring a photo of a young Ethan and a note written to him by a girl named Alice Gilchrist. Afraid of being caught, Lily takes the yearbook and leaves the house

Back at home, Lily calls Henry to debrief. Henry tells her that Ethan’s brother, whose name is Scott, hasn’t seen him for 12 years and describes him as evil, the same word that Ethan’s sister used. Scott told Henry a story of a time in which Ethan had seemingly engineered the rape of Scott’s high school girlfriend during a party that Scott hadn’t attended. Scott also suspects that Ethan currently works in the visual arts field, as he’s always expressed interest in it.

Lily tells Henry about the events of her day and reads him the note she found in Ethan’s yearbook, which compliments Ethan on his criminal behavior and “wish[es] [him] a successful life of thievery and forgery” (172). Lily googles Alice and finds out that she’s a tattoo artist currently living in Queens, New York. Lily spends her evening considering Ethan’s psychology, deducing that if he works in visual arts, it’s likely a profession that allows him to feel superior to other people. Right before bed, Henry calls to tell her that he’s found an article reporting Martha’s murder, linking it to an unsolved homicide in the Portsmouth area, which Lily suspects to be Ethan’s handiwork. Just then, Alice emails Lily to tell her that she’ll be happy to meet the following day.

The next morning, Lily arrives in Queens to meet with Alice in a coffee shop, where Alice tells Lily that she last saw Ethan about five years after their graduation from high school, in an art gallery in New York City. Alice describes Ethan as looking like he did during high school, “a preppy serial killer” (177). Alice also describes high school Ethan as obsessed with making money with art forgeries. She notes that he once described himself as a sociopath. Alice insists that they’d had a purely platonic relationship, as Alice is a lesbian (though she wasn’t out at the time), and Ethan had once told her that “if he slept with [her] then he’d have to kill [her]” (180).

Before Lily leaves, Alice tells her that Ethan’s favorite film in high school was Ferris Bueller’s Day Off. Later, Lily researches the film in connection with art forgery in order to find Ethan’s alias. She googles the names of characters in the film and finds the Charnock Gallery in Philadelphia, which lists paintings for sale from an artist by the name of Garth Volbeck, Charlie Sheen’s character. The gallery owner’s name is listed as well: Robert Charnock. Lily finds a photograph of the gallery’s staff at a fundraiser and realizes that Robert looks suspiciously like Ethan. Lily calls Henry to tell him her discovery, and he excitedly promises to investigate the lead.

Lily goes for a walk through town, feeling an uneasy prickle on her skin as she passes through a leafy, deserted area. Just then, a car pulls up next to her. Ethan steps out, holding a pistol down at his waist. He forces Lily into the trunk of his car and drives off.