A twenty-two-year-old drama student goes to a brunch meeting at a producer’s house in the Hollywood Hills. Her agent set it up. It turns out there are no other actors there. She gets out, eventually, and comes back and sits at a kitchen table with two women she barely knows and explains what he did with his hands, and what he said he would do to her career either way. Then she explains why she will not be going to the police. It is his word against hers, and she is nobody, and he has obviously done this before and is obviously still working. Nobody at that table argues with her. To All the Men I’ve Killed Before by Katy Brent is a very funny novel about a vegan serial killer taking her little sister to Los Angeles, and it is built entirely on the moment a woman decides that reporting it would be a waste of everyone’s afternoon.
The Woman Who Will Not Report It
That scene is not an aside. It is the book’s thesis in miniature.
Kitty Collins kills men. She has done it across three novels now, to a code she made up herself: nobody innocent, nobody vulnerable, and the kill has to serve a purpose. She is in Los Angeles for one specific man, a therapist who put her best friend in a coma and then left the country while she was still unconscious.
What To All the Men I’ve Killed Before by Katy Brent keeps doing, quietly, underneath the designer labels and the dismemberment jokes, is show you the alternative each time. There is always a legal route available. It is always the route nobody takes.
The Law, as All the Men I’ve Killed Before Describes It
The book stacks its examples deliberately, and a group should notice the pattern.
An ageing film star had allegations made against him by three women. The cases were dropped for lack of evidence. Within months he was back on set, and the women who spoke were harassed off the internet and one of them moved states. Elsewhere a first-time domestic violence conviction is discussed in flatly procedural terms: a respected professional, four or five years at most, possibly no custodial sentence at all given how full the prisons are.
To All the Men I’ve Killed Before by Katy Brent is not subtle about any of this and does not intend to be. It also has the honesty to let a character ask what the point of the MeToo movement was if a producer can still lock a door in 2026. Groups will want to sit with the fact that the novel supplies no answer.
Four Dead Women and Nobody Looking
The most uncomfortable strand in To All the Men I’ve Killed Before by Katy Brent concerns a killer the police will not admit exists.
Four women have been found dead in West Hollywood inside eighteen months. All of them had accounts on the same adult-content subscription site. The connection has been made by amateurs on a forum, not by any investigator, and one death has been formally recorded as a tragic accident.
The younger sister’s argument is blunt: if a serial killer were picking off tech executives, there would be a task force. Because these women sold pictures of themselves, the case gets filed and forgotten. A reading group that works in policing, safeguarding or journalism will have a great deal to say here, and probably will not agree.
The Ally Who Talks Over Everyone
For light relief, and it is the best comic writing in the book, there is Cort.
He hosts a feminist podcast for men. He has done shadow work, mirror work and rage circles. And he greets women with a small bow. When a young woman is assaulted at an audition, he arrives to say that of course this should never happen, and also that we need to talk about boundaries, and that Agnes should not have gone alone, and that he is here if she ever wants to talk to a man about healthy masculinity.
He is a caricature and every reading group will recognise him instantly. To All the Men I’ve Killed Before by Katy Brent is making a real point with him: the performance of being one of the good ones costs nothing and changes nothing.
Flaws Worth Naming in All the Men I’ve Killed Before
It is not a flawless book.
- The argument is delivered in speeches. Characters explain feminism to each other at length rather than the plot doing it for them.
- The plotting is loose. A long thread is set up carefully and then paid off as a gag.
- The male characters are types. Deliberately, but it does soften the target.
- The ending arrives at a sprint after four hundred unhurried pages.
None of that spoils it. The voice is fast and properly funny, and the comedy is always pointed at the men rather than at what they have done, which is a harder line to hold than it looks.
Questions Worth Asking About All the Men I’ve Killed Before
Start with the audition. Ask the group whether the young woman was right not to report it. Most people say she should have. Then ask what they think would have happened if she had, and watch the room change its mind halfway through its own answer.
Second, and this is where it gets good: the older sister has rules, the younger has none. The younger one wants to go after the man who whistles at them outside the airport, on the grounds that the small things are what make the large ones possible. Ask where each person in the group would draw that line, and then ask them to defend the line rather than just name it.
Third, and best saved: To All the Men I’ve Killed Before by Katy Brent invites the reader to enjoy the deaths of men who have not been convicted of anything. Ask the group whether they enjoyed it. Then ask what it would take, in real life, for them to be certain enough. Nobody comes out of that question looking as tidy as they went in.
Groups that finish this one should go back to How to Kill Men and Get Away With It, where Kitty’s rules are invented in the first place and are much harder to defend. Bright Young Women by Jessica Knoll is the serious counterpart, about who gets believed and who gets remembered. Molka by Monika Kim takes the same fury somewhere colder and stranger. And Bald-Faced Liar by Victoria Helen Stone suits a group that wants a woman with a plan and no scruples at all.
What It Leaves Behind
Twice, the novel stops and reproduces a forum thread. Not a summary of one. The actual posts, with their usernames and their vote counts, underneath news reports about the murdered women.
Someone is ending those hoes. He’s doing society a favour. Sounds legit, with the sarcasm tag. And then, further down, once the speculation has warmed up: whether he sleeps with them first, and which of them anyone would have wanted to, and a joke about needing a sidekick.
That is what To All the Men I’ve Killed Before by Katy Brent finally hands a reading group, and it is the reason the comedy earns its keep. Everything else in the book is invention. Those comment sections are not, and every person at the table will have read something exactly like them this month under a real woman’s name. The novel’s revenge fantasy is preposterous and the group will enjoy dismantling it. The thing it is a fantasy about is not preposterous at all, and that is much harder to put down.