My book review of 'The Kind Worth Killing' by Peter Swanson

by Peter Swanson
The Kind Worth Killing
by Peter Swanson

Strangers are stranded at an airport bar waiting for their delayed flight to be reinstated. In the time spent together, over drinks, the businessman confides in the young woman that his wife is having an affair and he wishes her dead. The woman says she can help...

Alternately Ted and Lily take up the story.

We learn about Ted the successful businessman and how he spied on his wife and discovered her infidelity with the builder contracted to work on their new seafront property. And about Lily and her dysfunctional family where she learned to kill first to save her cat, then to protect herself, and then to exert her revenge.

The murders and the sex scenes were unpleasant and I could certainly have done without the detail, but overall this is an astonishingly good thriller with the reader in the unsettling position of siding or sympathising with the murderers... to a point. There are successful twists, in my opinion, as you really don't know who you can trust, and the ending was a satisfactory conclusion.

I really enjoyed this book - the pace was good, it kept me guessing and I believed in the characters for the majority of the action. But if you think about the content more deeply - is murder really this easy? how many seemingly normal people have these desires to kill? I don't want to read many more books from this perspective!

 

Date of this review: October 2015