Kill Your Darlings by Peter Swanson

I’m sad to say that I was disappointed in this book. I really enjoyed “The Kind Worth Killing” by Peter Swanson and was excited to read this book, but felt the execution was lacking and the characters were flat.

It was clever to tell this story in reverse, and with the reveal at the end it tied it together well, however before the reveal the story just drags and is quite boring. Thom and Wendy are certainly not the good guys which we find out very early, however they weren’t even interesting villains. Again, I was just bored with their characters and annoyed by their personalities.

Nothing really happened in the first part of the book that added to their characters or the overall story. Things started to pick up in the last fourth of the book but by then it was too late to really be excited by anything, and it didn’t tie in the first part really. I didn’t have any moments where I was like oooh, I get why it was slow or now I see why that scene happened. Nope, you only get one tie in from the very beginning and very end.

So I’m sorry to say I won’t be recommending this book, but I’ll still give Swanson a try on other books.

Thank you NetGalley for providing me with an ARC of this book.

Reptitive - explaining same moments from both POVs but nothing new added in the second recollection

Synopsis: 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.

View my Review on Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/7884322577