Murali Venugopalan

Ikill Murali Venugopalan

The theme behind the thriller iKill is simple: technology is used to propagate pure human evil for the purpose of revenge. A page-turner with commercial appeal and a word count of approximately 80,000, iKill features well-defined characters: sixteen students who live on one floor of a newly renovated residence hall (Edgar Hall), a few employees, and law-enforcement officials including Thomas Malkin, a terrorism expert and Gulf War veteran who now works as a consultant to the Department of Homeland Security and occasionally as a private detective. Malkin has recently received accolades and national media attention for cracking various domestic terror cases. This time, however, Malkin finds himself in a different locale and situation. Returning to his alma mater, Blackwood College (located in rural Virginia), to give a speech on the challenge on international terrorism in the post-9/11 era, Malkin decides to lend local law-enforcement officials a hand upon hearing that a young student was found murdered in the basement of Edgar Hall, the same dormitory Malkin lived in twenty years ago. The fast-paced plot leaves Malkin and local police baffled at first, as iKill is not your typical murderer. He sends threatening e-mails to prospective victims, and he follows up on each successful murder by sending demented e-mails and pictures to his next chosen victim. Malkin tracks down the identity of iKill and traps the murderer after a midnight car chase outside Richmond. Thus Malkin came to Blackwood to talk about international terrorism and instead led an intense domestic terrorism investigation of a serial killer on his old college campus.