Kill Your Darlings
A Novel
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3.6 • 69 Ratings
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
“A dazzlingly clever murder mystery, told backwards, asking the question: why would this loving wife murder her husband?”—Gillian McAllister, New York Times bestselling author of Famous Last Words and Wrong Place Wrong Time
From the New York Times bestselling author of The Kind Worth Killing and Eight Perfect Murders comes an inventive, utterly propulsive murder-mystery in reverse, tracing a marriage back in time to uncover the dark secret at its heart.
Thom and Wendy Graves have been married for over twenty-five years. They live in a beautiful Victorian on the north shore of Massachusetts. Wendy is a published poet and Thom teaches English literature at a nearby university. Their son, Jason, is all grown up. All is well…except that Wendy wants to murder her husband.
What happens next has everything to do with what happened before. The story of Wendy and Thom’s marriage is told in reverse, moving backward through time to witness key moments from the couple’s lives—their fiftieth birthday party, buying their home, Jason’s birth, the mysterious death of a work colleague—all painting a portrait of a marriage defined by a single terrible act they plotted together many years ago.
Eventually we learn the details of what Thom and Wendy did in their early twenties, a secret that has kept them bound together through the length of their marriage. But its power over them is fraying, and each of them begins to wonder if they would be better off making sure their spouse carries their secrets to the grave.
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.
Customer Reviews
I was disappointed
I love Peter Swanson, but this was the least favorite of his books. I couldn’t find anything to like about the adult protagonists and I never found the connect between the Young Thom and the adult Thom. I didn’t see the point of going back in time. I didn’t think it worked. And the ending came up suddenly and felt flat.