The Good Lie

Robert Kavin is a defense attorney whose teenage son was the sixth victim of the Bloody Heart Killer. He becomes Gwen’s love interest when the two meet after a funeral. When Robert believes that the police have wrongly accused high school teacher Randall Thomspon of being the Bloody Heart Killer, he steps up to offer Randall free legal services and builds a case that will clear his name. He enlists Gwen to construct a profile of the Bloody Heart Killer in order to prove that Randall is not the culprit.

The narrative eventually reveals that Robert knew the identity of the real Bloody Heart Killer all along and knew that the killer was a patient of Gwen’s. His entire endeavor is therefore an attempt to seek justice against anyone who could have played a role in his son’s death, directly or indirectly. He perceives that Gwen has been negligent in her role as the killer’s therapist. Thus, Robert obsesses over his son’s killer as a way of coping with his grief. He also takes it upon himself to kill John Abbott and to try to get Gwen to confess her knowledge about John’s true nature.

He is frequently described as handsome, intelligent, and cocky. Much like Gwen, he allows his profession to affect his speech patterns and his approach to others; he often grills Gwen with pointed questions that are reminiscent of a courtroom cross-examination. Robert and Gwen become romantically and sexually involved, but his interactions with her are ambivalent, given the boundaries of their professional relationship and the distrust that he has for her due to the secrets he believes her to be hiding. He is implied to have a temper, which goes largely unrevealed until the final confrontation with Gwen at the climax of the story.

Scott Harden is a teenage boy and the Bloody Heart Killer’s seventh target. After being kidnapped and subjected to weeks of physical and sexual torture, Scott “escapes” from his attacker and returns home, after which he accuses a local high school teacher of being the perpetrator. It is later revealed that John and Brooke Abbott were the real Bloody Heart Killers and that Scott conspired with Brooke to frame Randall Thompson.

Scott comes from a wealthy family and is popular and well-liked at school. However, he noticeably withdraws from all social interaction after his kidnapping. His mother Nita initially suspects that this withdrawal is a symptom of his attempt to cope with the trauma of his experience, but Scott is actually reeling from heartbreak, believing that Brooke Abbott has abandoned him. As Gwen later observes, Scott’s love for Brooke is a classic case of Stockholm syndrome. Although Brooke was complicit in Scott’s kidnapping, torture, and rape, he comes to believe that he and Brook have a relationship based on genuine care and mutual understanding. He maintains that Brooke is just as much a victim of John, her husband, as Scott is. Scott even goes so far as to contemplate killing Randall Thompson, who raped Brooke when she was still in high school. His act of framing Randall for the Bloody Heart murders is his attempt to get justice for Brooke. Although his attempt to murder Randall at the end of the novel is thwarted by his mother, Scott’s ordeal and subsequent near-descent into murder hints at a recurring cycle—that of a person subjected to violence and trauma who turns to violence themselves.

John Abbott is one of Gwen’s patients: a pharmacist who has violent fantasies about killing his wife, Brooke. At the start of the novel, he leaves Gwen a frantic voicemail before poisoning Brooke and apparently taking his own life. His and Brooke’s deaths fuel Gwen’s guilt and self-doubt, and her feelings only worsen when it is revealed that John and Brooke were behind the Bloody Heart murders.

John is described as fastidious, detailed, and precise, fitting Gwen’s profile of the Bloody Heart Killer; Gwen notes that John was “a tyrant about punctuality” (6). He kidnapped teenage boys in a twisted attempt to deal with the rape that he himself faced when he was younger. Alongside his wife Brooke, John committed several murders, the first of which Gwen suspects was the person who initially assaulted him. By the time of his death, there were a total of six Bloody Heart victims and one escapee, Scott Harden. As Gwen notes, John had no qualms about his actions. Ultimately, his violent urges turn toward his wife because he has a possessive love for her that manifests as rage and intense jealousy.

Brooke Abbott is the wife of John Abbott. Together, the couple committed several gruesome and sexually violent murders, including the Bloody Heart murders that plagued Los Angeles for months prior to the beginning of the novel. Though John kidnapped the teenage boys and physically and sexually tortured them, Brooke was complicit in his crimes and was emotionally cruel to the young men. Scott’s chapters describe how she also took advantage of him sexually and manipulated him into believing that she loved him. Brooke was the nurturing counterpart to John’s sadism, tending to the boys’ wounds and keeping them well-fed and relatively cared for, while leading them to believe that she had genuine romantic feelings for them. The romantic nature of these relationships is only confirmed in Scott’s case, but it is insinuated that this may also have been the case with Gabe Kavin, leading to Gabe’s uniquely violent death at John’s hands, as John was driven by a jealousy-fueled rage. Brooke was raped by Randall Thompson when she was in high school, but no one believed her when she reported the crime. Thus, she and Scott plan to frame Randall for John’s crimes.

Ted Saxe is a detective investigating John and Brooke Abbott’s deaths. He questions Gwen in the wake of their deaths, but Gwen is reluctant to provide the details of John’s true thoughts and intentions for fear of breaching patient confidentiality and prompting an investigation into her practice. Ted Saxe is described as stern and distrustful, and he functions as an antagonist to Gwen as he attempts to get more information from her. Whereas Robert represents a notion of justice that is subjective and morally gray, Ted Saxe represents justice in the traditional, straightforward sense.