Nine Lives
'I loved this.' Ann Cleeves
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3.7 • 11 Ratings
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- $13.99
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- $13.99
Publisher Description
'Deliciously ingenious.' Daily Mail
'Keeps you guessing right to the end.' PETER MAY
'Smartly entertaining.' Washington Post
'So beautifully written, so gripping, so perfect.' SOPHIE HANNAH
If you're on the list you're marked for death.
The envelope is unremarkable. There is no return address. It contains a single, folded, sheet of white paper.
The envelope drops through the mail slot like any other piece of post. But for the nine complete
strangers who receive it - each of them recognising just one name, their own, on the enclosed list - it
will be the most life altering letter they ever receive. It could also be the last, as one by one, they start to
meet their end.
What readers are saying:
***** 'It gripped me from start to finish.'
***** 'Prepare to be blown away.'
***** 'Another fast paced edge of your seat masterclass.'
***** 'What an absolutely wild ride.'
***** 'Best Peter Swanson murder mystery I've read.'
***** 'An absolute winner . . . A must read for lovers of a good thriller.'
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Swanson (Every Vow You Break) neatly riffs on Agatha Christie's classic And Then There Were None in this taut thriller. Nine Americans from across the country—a stressed suburban father, an aspiring actor, a singer-songwriter, a resort owner, a retired businessman, a rich man's mistress, an English professor, an oncology nurse, and FBI agent Jessica Winslow—each receives an envelope in the mail from an unknown sender containing only an identical list of nine names, including their own. The recipients, who don't recognize the other names on the list, vary in their initial reactions; some are disturbed, while others barely pay attention to it. Then someone drowns one of the nine. Winslow, a federal investigator in Albany, N.Y., begins to probe whether the eight others, who have no apparent connections to one another, are all targets of a killer. Winslow's mission becomes more urgent when another on the list is gunned down. Swanson makes the plotline plausible, despite radically transforming the setting from Christie's isolated island with its closed circle of suspects, to the entire continental U.S. This is a well-crafted page-turner.
Customer Reviews
Deliberately derivative
Author
American. Has written eight novels in the crime/mystery genre and collected several awards and nominations. His books have been translated into 30 languages. His short fiction, poetry, and features appear in Asimov’s Science Fiction, The Atlantic Monthly, Measure, The Guardian, The Strand Magazine, Yankee Magazine, among others.
Plot
Nine people in various places of the mainland US receive a printed list of nine names, including theirs. None of them, at least none we hear about, recognises any of the other names. All but two are fortyish, all but one is white. There seems to be nothing connecting them. The FBI gets involved early because one person on the list is an FBI agent. Then people on the list start getting murdered in various ways. Investigations, both official and unofficial, occur. Resolution follows after the final name on the list tops himself and leaves a note in an obscure location that explains everything. If this plot line sounds familiar, it should. Dame Agatha’s 1938 classic, And Then There Were None (see footnote 1), was basically the same, except it featured ten victims rather than nine, and was set on an island off the coast of Blighty rather than in the Land of the Free, coastal Maine in particular.
Characters
Character development limited because most of them get dead quick smart and are innocent victims, targeted to…you’ll have to read the book to find out.
Writing
Crisp, well-paced narrative by an accomplished writer of genre fiction.
Bottom line
Deliberately derivative homage to the master (see footnote 3)
Footnotes
1. Dame Agatha’s original title, Ten Little N***ers, was unacceptable in America for obvious reasons. The book continued to be sold under the original title, which was taken from a popular children’s fable of the era, in Commonwealth countries until 1985, although it was re-titled Ten Little Indians, which is just as bad, in some places for a while.
2. iI 1965, my mother gave me a heavily dog-eared paperback copy of Ten Little N***ers (no asterisks back then) to read. I was seven-going-on-eight and heartily sick of “kids’ books,” but not yet ready for my father’s bound set of classics printed on paper so thin I ripped it when I tried to turn the page. (Perhaps if he’d give me Oliver Twist instead of The Old Curiosity Shop to start with, things might have been different.) Dame Agatha sucked me in. I’d finished all 66 of her novels, along with some John Buchan, Alistair Maclean and the like, by grade 6 then discovered holocaust literature and had to start seeing a therapist. (The part about the therapist isn’t true. I wrote just joking initially, but placing those words anywhere near the word holocaust seemed ill advised)
3. Mr Swanson is into homage in a big way of late. His 2020 book Rules for Perfect Murders (American title: Eight Perfect Murders) was about an antiquarian bookseller recruited by the FBI to help solve a series of murders styled after the plots of famous murder mysteries (Dame Agatha’s ABC Murders is one). Maybe it’s time for him to start coming up with ideas of his own again.