‘The first attempt at killing her husband
was the night of
the dinner party…’
WHEN it comes to wickedly seductive and outrageously clever
crime mysteries, there is one name that always jumps out from the crowd.
Rightly labelled the grand master of misdirection, award-winning
US author Peter Swanson’s awesome literary brain loves nothing better than to
defy readers’ expectations and in this stunning and ingeniously plotted domestic
thriller, he turns storytelling on its head with a dark murder mystery that starts
at the end… and ends at the beginning.
Kill Your Darlings – soon to be a major film starring Julia Roberts – is one of Swanson’s (pictured below) most ambitious and breathtakingly accomplished novels yet and with brilliant bestsellers like The Kind Worth Killing, Rules for Perfect Murders and The Girl with a Clock for a Heart already under his belt, this dazzling new page-turner is most definitely something to shout about.
So buckle up, sit back and enjoy the ride as we meet
middle-aged couple Thom and Wendy Graves who have been together for forty
years. Their lives would appear to outsiders to be happy and more than just comfortable
at their beautiful Victorian house at upmarket Goose Neck on the north shore of
Massachusetts. Wendy is a published poet, Thom teaches English literature at a
nearby university and their son, Jason, is grown up and has flown the nest.
But beneath the veneer, all is not well because what Wendy really
wants is to murder her husband. Thom has become an incredible disappointment to
her… he drinks too much, flirts with other women, and worst of all, he’s in
danger of revealing their dark secret.
The clue came on the evening of a dinner party at their home
when Thom announced to everyone present that he was writing a murder mystery,
news which instantly alarmed Wendy who urgently needed to find out if Thom was
‘writing some version of their own story, a story they had agreed was never to
be shared with anyone.’
But what happens next has everything to do with what happened before. And so begins the unwinding of Wendy and Thom’s marriage in reverse order, a story that moves backwards through time to witness key moments from the couple’s lives – their fiftieth birthday party, buying their home, Jason’s birth, career highs and lows – all painting a portrait of a marriage defined by a single terrible act which they plotted together many years ago. It’s a secret that has kept them bound together through the years of their marriage but its power over them is fraying, and now it’s not just Wendy who is beginning to wonder if they would be better off making sure that their spouse carries their secrets to the grave…
Written with Swanson’s signature stylish elegance, flashes of dark humour and awesome plotting skills, Kill Your Darlings works up a head of steam not so much from what is happening in the present but from disturbing events in the past which have poisoned Thom and Wendy’s marriage and which are exposed with each passing chapter. And it is the unpeeling of those layers of secrets in reverse order, the increasing dead weight of the couple’s shared guilt, and the claustrophobic imprisonment that their relationship has become, which gives the story a super-powered impetus, a growing sense of deadly threat, and a deep-seated understanding of how people change over time.
The result is a riveting journey through a minefield of youthful
conceit, domestic discord and petty college politics, and at the heart of the action
is an exquisitely imagined cast of very human characters, not least the
brittle, callous Wendy and her hard-drinking, philandering husband Thom, both
trapped in the hellish consequences of a marriage defined by a moment in time.
As much a contemporary moral fable as a gripping, twisting
and ingeniously clever murder mystery, Kill Your Darlings is a masterpiece of
literary form propelled through suspense, menace and a catalogue of toxic
secrets by Swanson’s psychological prowess… and confirming his enthronement as
one of the reigning kings of crime writing!
(Faber & Faber, hardback, £18.99)