Peter Swanson is one of those authors that always delivers a good story. I stumbled onto him with his book Eight Perfect Murders. This led to me reading more and more of his novels. Of the ones I have read, they always seem to have a unique premise and hold my attention. Kill Your Darlings was my latest Swanson read.
The presentation of story itself is an interesting one. It is reminiscent of Wrong Place, Wrong Time by Gillian McAllister in that the story starts at the end and goes backwards. Here is the Goodreads synopsis:
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.
I listened to the audio book. Each chapter was divided by year (and sometimes dates) which contained subchapters. As the synopsis says, everything that happens next has something to do with what you just read. In other words – here’s what happens here and the next chapter explains what led up to that, etc…
At times, I felt that the story might have been better if it was told in the correct order. Then there were times where the reverse order really worked better. I’m torn on the presentation of this book. By all means, I enjoyed the story, but by the time I got to the end, I was waiting for something more. For what it is worth, at the end, the story comes full circle. I suppose that made the ending ok, it all ties together.
I’m torn. So I will rate right in the middle.
3 out of 5 stars.
Various Ramblings of a Nostalgic Italian 