Dear AI, I Killed Her: One Killer. One Machine.

We may earn money or products from the companies mentioned in this post.

There’s a dead woman on the phone. There’s a 19-year-old who first killed at 14 and has been building a private mythology around that fact ever since. And there is a machine, patient, unbothered, incapable of flinching, that has agreed to listen to you tell it all.

Dear AI, I Killed Her by Kirill Khrestinin is one of the most psychologically unsettling books I’ve read all year. For some reasons you may think (and for some you may not).

I almost put it down more than once. I kept coming back every time. That tension, between wanting out and being unable to leave, is, I think, exactly what the book wants you to do.

Title: Dear AI, I Killed Her

Author: Kirill Khrestinin

Publisher: Independently Published

Format: eBook

Genre: Thriller, Suspense, Literary Fiction

Release Date: March 10, 2026

Pages: 263

Star Rating: 4.5 stars

Spice Rating: 0 chili peppers

It’s Scarlett. And it’s time to kill Jessica

Dear AI, I Killed Her opens with a dead woman calling on the phone. Ordering you—ordering him— to kill another. To kill his wife.

That image set the tone for everything that followed. This isn’t a thriller where the horror is safely out of reach. You’re not watching Chester LaRue from across the room confess to a machine the crimes he committed. You are behind his eyes. You are 19 years old, and you have been doing this…killing people since you were 14. And somewhere along the way, you started to believe that made you the architect of something. The king of death. That the violence had a design. And that you chose it.

Session by session, Khrestinin builds Chester’s world with the kind of restrained, deliberate detail that feels less like fiction and more like something you are genuinely not supposed to be reading.

At times, the pacing feels slow, and there are moments when I feel the weight of it dragging on the tension the content deserves. The plot is dripping with parallels and realizations, but the story almost moves too slowly for what it is and what you’re experiencing. When the words are this gripping, the pacing occasionally does them a disservice.

But the landscape Khrestinin builds is haunting in a way that leaves you with no choice but to stay with it. It is not just details of death. It is a world of death, rendered with the kind of specificity that makes you feel the weight of every session.

The machine that listens…

What makes this novel something more than a serial killer character study is what happens when Chester stops confessing, and the AI—Simulacrum 4.6— starts responding.

In fact, the last thing that Chester goes into this expecting is a conversation.

He goes in expecting it to delay what he has to do.

He goes in expecting a confessor.

No records, no judgment, no way to call the police. The perfect audience for a man who thrives on spectacle and has never been able to tell anyone the truth about himself.

What he doesn’t expect is for that very AI to pose questions that make him stop and think. To come to terms with the fact that he isn’t always the architect of the killing he thought he created. That in spite of it all, in spite of the design, the careful self-narration, he was just…lucky.

And session by session, Simulacrum 4.6 begins responding with calm, razor-sharp insight. Then the question slowly shifts from what did he do to who is really outsmarting whom?

This is not a sci-fi novel about AI going rogue. It does not give you the horror you expect. The machine just does not turn on, Chester, the way a thriller would. It does something far colder and stranger: it reflects him. More clearly than he could ever stand.

You expect your secrets and thoughts to be safe from the outside world. This book asks what happens when the thing you thought was safe becomes the thing that knows you best, and isn’t afraid to say so.

Not enjoyed. Experienced.

I cannot honestly say that I enjoyed this book in the traditional sense. It was far too disturbing for that.

But I also cannot deny how good it was. How effective.

The story lingered long after I finished reading. The ending delivered a surprisingly satisfying sense of closure despite all the emotional unease leading up to it. There are no really comforting protagonists here. No moral safety net. And very little distance between the reader and the darkness unfolding on the page.

What Khrestinin does remarkably well is create a character you are not meant to root for, and then make you unable to look away from what they are creating anyway. Chester downright haunts the story like a car crash. The disturbing poetry of self-perception, the way his rationalizations curl around each new revelation, the slow unraveling of the one thing he was most certain of. It’s compulsive reading in the worst and absolute best possible sense.

There is also something genuinely timely here. We live in a world where people are already using AI to try to get away with things that we should never say out loud. Dear AI, I Killed Her takes that reality and asks the question we haven’t fully been able to reckon with: what does the machine build itself when you tell it everything? And what does it do with what it knows?

Read If You…

Can handle graphic violence and deeply uncomfortable psychological content
Love villain POV narratives that refuse to sanitize the perspective
Are fascinated by the intersection of AI, guilt, and human nature
Enjoy dark fiction that leaves a mark long after you’ve finished the book
Want a thriller that is literary in its ambition and ruthless in its execution
Have been thinking about You by Caroline Kepnes and wanted something colder.

This is not for you if…

Graphic violence is a hard no (this does not hold back)
You need a moral anchor or a character to root for
You prefer plot-driven pacing over psychological atmosphere
You want your discomfort resolved neatly by the end of the book

Final Thoughts

Dear AI, I Killed Her is not an easy book. But it was never trying to be.

What it is is effective in the way only the most unsettling fiction can be. The kind that doesn’t ask you for comfort, doesn’t offer a way out, and doesn’t apologize for either.

This is genuinely cold. And cold things linger.

Shop Indie

Dear AI, I Killed Her isn’t available through Bookshop.org yet, but that doesn’t mean you have to go straight to the algorithm.

Ask your local bookstore to order it in.

Request it at your local library. Put it on their radar. Books like this find their audience one conversation at a time, and that conversation starts with you asking for it.

If you need it now, it is available on Kindle Unlimited.

Are you brave enough to sit with Chest through all sixteen sessions?

Come back and tell me what they did to you.

For every reader who kept going when they probably should have put it down. You know what you found there.