Review of “Deadly Route” by Karen DeVanie & Anne Varner

Score: 91+/100 (9.1+ out of 10)

Some monsters wear familiar faces.

They sit beside you on the school bus.
They laugh at the same jokes.
They know your teachers, your classmates, your neighborhood, your routines.
They blend into the ordinary background of your life until the day comes when the mask falls away, and everyone is left wondering how they missed what was right in front of them.

Deadly Route by Karen DeVanie and Anne Varner is a chilling, heartbreaking, true-crime-inspired novel about murder, memory, guilt, evil, community trauma, and the devastating ripple effects of one horrific act of violence.

The book follows three central perspectives: Georgia, Olive, and Toby.

Georgia is the victim, but the authors wisely refuse to reduce her to that single word. She is not presented as a crime-scene detail, a headline, or a tragic symbol. She is a daughter, a wife, a mail carrier, a young woman with dreams, jokes, memories, faith, family, and a future. Her chapters are filled with warmth: her momma’s chocolate cake, her romance with Mack, the smell of lavender, her college memories, her wedding, and the small joys of rural life. These details matter because they force the reader to understand exactly what was stolen.

Giving a little attention to Georgia is probably a good thing. It's an improvement (or at least an attempt at improvement) on CLICK-CLICK-CLICK, the authors' other work, which we argued spent way too much time focusing on the perpetrator/killer (calling them an "executioner" or "assassin"). We don't remember that being an issue with this book.

Olive provides one of the book’s most compelling emotional angles. She knew Toby before the murder. She rode the bus with him. She shared jokes with him. She saw his mood swings, his rage, his oddness, his outbursts, and his cruelty, but like many people in small communities, she tried to explain them away. Maybe he was just moody. Maybe he was just awkward. Maybe he was just one of those people you learned how to handle.

That is one of the most unsettling things about Deadly Route: it captures how easy it is to normalize danger when danger grows up beside you.

Toby, meanwhile, is a very disturbing and unsettling character. As mentioned before, his inner darkness is personified through “The Savage,” a violent internal force he uses to explain, justify, and indulge his worst impulses. His chapters are ugly, uncomfortable, and sometimes difficult to read, but that is also the point. The authors are not interested in making him fascinating in a glamorous way. They are showing the mechanics of a predator who hides behind quietness, resentment, and social camouflage. "The Savage" is essentially the same as "HIM" from The Minds of Mortals by J.R. Castro, Mark from Memoir of a Mangled Mind by Steven Simmons Shelton, or Cat from You Will Never Be Normal by Catherine Klatzker—a violent, domineering alternate-personas capable of great evil.

Something interesting and extra frightening about Toby as the Savage is how he seems more premeditated and calculated than some of the alternate-personas in these other books. Yes, he can be impulsive (like throwing the book at the teacher or attacking Lexi on the bus), but he is capable of planning and acting destructively based on those plans. That is what makes the incident with Mrs. Bernstein so disturbing. Toby does not simply lash out at her in the library. He absorbs the humiliation, lets it ferment, waits until later, gets the machete he calls The Annihilator, and destroys her yard when he knows the family will not be home. That is not just rage. That is revenge with a schedule.

The same is true, in an even more horrifying way, with Georgia. Toby does not accidentally stumble into violence. He arms himself, places himself in the tree line, waits for a vulnerable target, and then acts when the opportunity presents itself. The violence may be emotionally fueled, but it is not mindless. It has direction. It has selection. It has intent.

The horror of Toby is not that he is obviously monstrous to everyone around him. The horror is that he is familiar.

He is the average kid. The quiet kid. The moody classmate. The one people learn to avoid when he is in a bad mood. The one whose red flags are rationalized because accepting the truth would require everyone around him to admit something terrifying: evil does not always announce itself.

Now, with all that said about Toby, there is a part in which he's like "I am fire! I am thunder!" and all we could think about was, "I'm Batman!"

Anyway...

The book’s strongest psychological thread comes through Olive’s retrospective guilt. She wonders if canceling a study date with Toby triggered the chain of events that led to Georgia’s death. Logically, the reader understands that Olive is not responsible. Toby made his own choices. Toby alone is responsible. Yet emotionally, Olive’s guilt makes painful sense. Survivors often search for a “why” because randomness is unbearable. If there is a reason, even a false one, then maybe the world feels less chaotic.

That is where Deadly Route becomes more than a crime story. It becomes a story about the people left behind and the questions that never stop echoing.

Like, could you imagine being Olive? Maybe you've been in a situation like Olive: knowing someone who gave you red flags or you were aware was a dangerous threat. Would you feel guilt? A drive to do something? Say something? Would you refuse to get involved or intervene for fear of repercussions?

We've read this relatively short novel quite a few times, more than most novels. That's not necessarily because we enjoyed it, but because its disjointed nature (with multiple different perspectives and stuff happening) can make it seem unfocused and hard to follow. However, when we were finally able to fully digest what the authors were going for, we appreciated this book more.

Check it out on Amazon!