Problematic, too, is the way the story relies on character tropes. It is a kind of numbness and weariness, a mental whiplash from surviving relentless jolts. The result is that the book lives on in the reader’s mind past its ending.īut something else happens at end of The Kind Worth Killing, an experience that will be familiar to anyone who has spent much time sitting through a big-budget blockbuster movie. The ending, too, is a tour-de-force of plotting, re-opening a situation that appears to be resolved. More points of view are added, and as new narrators emerge, the plot twists and turns so often that the reader is left breathless and off-kilter. Swanson dexterously handles the back-and-forth between both worlds, between past and present, and between the two points of view.Īs the planning for the murder progresses, the novel moves forward seamlessly, and the reader begins to wonder how the author will tie together the multiple plot strands. Miranda is also sleeping with her contractor, an aging bad boy named Brad. The plot alternates between the environs of Boston, where Ted and Lilly both live, and a seaside town in Maine, where Ted’s wife is supervising the building of a vacation McMansion. Swanson, a skillful prose stylist, shades Lilly’s seemingly bucolic childhood, growing up under two bohemian parents in rural Connecticut, with creepy subsurface details, such as the disused swimming pool in her backyard: “Over the years it had devolved back into a murky pond, its bottom and sides covered in algae, its surface constantly filmed in rotting leaves, its unused filter clogged with the bloated corpses of mice and squirrels.”Īs the novel advances, Ted and Lilly grow closer but continue to hide secrets from each other.

To his surprise, Lilly says that she’ll help him plot the perfect murder.Īlternating between Ted and Lilly’s points of view, the early chapters reveal more about their pasts, including Ted’s relationship with dark-haired vixen Miranda.

After a couple of martinis, Ted confides to Lilly that his wife, Miranda, is having an affair and half-seriously says that he should kill her. In Swanson’s update, Ted Severson, a wealthy Internet investor, meets Lilly Kintner, a stunning redhead, at an airport bar. In Highsmith’s story, two strangers meet on a train and agree to murder one another’s family members in the perfect, unsolvable crime.

The Kind Worth Killing is billed as a twist on Patricia Highsmith’s classic novel, Strangers on a Train. The very qualities that could make it a successful film result in an uneven literary experience. It’s no surprise that it has already been optioned for a film adaptation the novel would make a great summer blockbuster. Peter Swanson’s new mystery, The Kind Worth Killing, is intricately plotted, fast-paced, and made up of tightly constructed scenes.

The Kind Worth Killing by Peter Swanson