Kill Your Darlings
'A dazzlingly clever murder mystery, told backwards.' Gillian McAllister
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- €18.99
Publisher Description
SOON TO BE A MAJOR FILM STARRING JULIA ROBERTS
FROM THE SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLING AUTHOR
'Deliciously dark.' JOHN MARRS
'Exhilarating' DANYA KUKAFKA
'Ingenious' LAURA LIPPMAN
What if the only way to bury the truth is to bury your husband?
The first attempt at killing her husband was the night of the dinner party.
Wendy and Thom met at school and through four decades of birthday milestones, weekends away and raising a son, they've lived a seemingly comfortable and successful life together. But what are the dark secrets their marriage was built on, and what has now, fatally, changed?
Readers were gripped by Kill Your Darlings:
⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ 'Twisty, gripping and wonderfully dark. Everything you could ask for'
⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ 'Brilliant . . . the unusual original structure of this book sets it apart from countless others in the genre.'
⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ 'Fascinating and chilling - this is more than just a murder story, we also witness the slow destruction of a marriage.'
⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ 'Inventive and oh so clever . . . I raced through this'
⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ 'Whoa - the backwards telling was ingenious!
⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ 'I read it in 2 sittings! Always a surprising twist!'
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Swanson's ambitious if uneven latest (after A Talent for Murder) tells a murder mystery in reverse. Thom and Wendy Graves appear to have it all: a beautiful home, flourishing careers, a successful son. There's just one thing: Wendy is planning to kill her husband. Moving from the current decayed state of the Graves' two-and-a-half-decade marriage to its beginning, Swanson takes readers through the couple's birthday celebrations, the birth of their son, the purchase of their first home, and—at the very start of their relationship—a violent decision that bonded them together. As the couple grows younger, readers gain insight into Wendy's coldness and Thom's drunkenness, until they finally learn what, exactly, has tied them to each other through the decades. As is typical for Swanson, there's plenty of shrewd sleight-of-hand, but the book's wily structure is often too clever for its own good, with certain surprises either deflated or overcomplicated by the demands of reverse chronology. The emotional impact, too, is often blunted. The author has done better before.
