The Kind Worth Killing: A Novel

Content Warning: This section of the guide includes references to the source text’s description of sexual assault and molestation of a minor.

Lily Kintner is the novel’s morally ambiguous anti-hero. She is a beautiful woman with green eyes and long red hair. Lily’s mysterious nature attracts people to her. Swanson describes her as cat-like and feral to emphasize her mysterious qualities. Lily grows up at Monk’s House in Connecticut with her parents, but eventually moves to London and Maine. She works at Winslow College as an archivist. Lily manipulates Ted to orchestrate her revenge against Miranda. Lily wants to stop her habit of murdering those who wrong her, however, any time she decides to stop killing, someone in her life hurts her and she falls back into her old ways.

Lily’s abuse from Chet as a child causes her to create a morality system outside of the justice system. She believes that some people in the world are “bad apples” and that they will just continue to hurt other people until they die. Lily sees murder in this situation as an act of mercy towards the future victims of the murdered person. Based on her morality system, Lily believes that she is only speeding up the inevitable death that the person will face at some point in their life.