Serial Killer Wanted by Nika Grace | One Killer, One Girl Who Wants Out

REVIEW

Dexter meets Killing Eve in the most unhinged classified ad you’ve ever seen. Nika Grace’s Serial Killer Wanted opens with a premise that is impossible to scroll past: a woman contemplating suicide posts an online ad for a serial killer. You need to kill, and I need to die. Let’s talk. Being a killer comes easy to Dani. So easy it’s getting boring, in fact. She doesn’t take orders from anyone, not even fate, and if she’s going to keep up the stab-and-shovel work, she’ll create her own code for who deserves a medal or a bullet.

Enter Jeika. Jeika wants to die, preferably before the cops who are on her tail find the evidence to prove what she did. When Dani comes across Jeika’s Help Wanted ad that could help her do just that… she’s intrigued. What starts as a transactional, anonymous exchange through secret emails quickly becomes something neither expected. The last thing Dani expects is to fall for her next victim, and the only one who can help Jeika die is also the one who’s starting to make her life interesting again.

This sapphic psychological suspense runs on deadpan snark and heart-pounding twists, and when it leans into the banter, it absolutely sings. Grace writes Dani with a delicious Dexter-style code and a bored-killer voice that makes her both terrifying and weirdly lovable. The email courtship between two women on very opposite sides of a death wish is darkly romantic in a Killing Eve way, and the breathless binge-read energy is real. Where it lost a star for me was the second half, when a twisted vigilante starts stalking them both. They may not be ready to fight for themselves, but how far will they go to save each other? That external threat crowds the central dynamic and pushes the plot from twisted-fun into a little too tangled.

Still, for fans of They Never Learn and Butcher and Blackbird, this is a wickedly fun, bloody love story. As the ad says, “Being a killer comes easy to Dani. So easy that it’s getting boring, in fact.” It’s not the most polished thriller of the year, but it’s self-aware, queer, and unapologetically messy, and I devoured it in a night.

 

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