Missed potential in Kill Your Darlings’ intriguing story

Peter Swanson has made himself known by releasing smart and complicated thrillers that keeps readers on edge, but in his latest book, Kill Your Darlings, he unintentionally abandons those themes that make his past books special. 

This book had the potential to be a great thriller, but it seems as though Swanson got caught up in the idea of making the book unique instead of making it a good read. This book should have been multi-layered with a twisty plot but ended up being flat and predictable for the whole 288 pages. 

The book begins with married couple Wendy and Thom at a dinner party they are hosting. Wendy wants to kill her husband. The first, sloppy, poorly-planned attempt fails. The second attempt was much more organized: she planned a location, cause of death and she staged it as a freak accident. This time, she succeeds.  

The book is pretty much downhill from there. And that was the first chapter. 

Part of the problem may be the book’s unusual and surprising narrative structure: this is a mystery told in reverse, starting with the crime and going backward in time from there. 

I don’t have a problem with the book being reverse chronological order, but I do have an issue with how it was executed, there simply isn’t enough hooking content throughout the chapters to keep readers interested when they already know the ending and can pretty easily assume that that the couple’s big secret is murder. Though I also feel that if Swanson used a classic timeline for this book, it still would’ve been as weak if not weaker than it already is. 

The book does have some strong points that can get you excited, for example, during one section there’s an investigation that is taking place that could have some consequences for the main characters, but again that thrill is quickly eradicated when the chapter ends and we go further back in time.  The synopsis for this book gives you the expectation that this is going to be an exciting, twist-filled story. “Utterly propulsive murder mystery,” declares the blurb on the cover. But for the majority of the book, it feels like it’s a regular story about marriage with no plot whatsoever. The characters do not have a lot of depth and have little to no character development. Apart from our two main characters, each chapter tends to introduce a new person, but then they disappear for the rest of the book with just a couple exceptions.  

At one point in the book, a private investigator is introduced after a murder that occurs earlier in the chronology, the detective gives you some hope that the story will pick up, but like the other characters, he doesn’t make another appearance in the book.  

In the end, this book shows that even the most unique of narratives can’t carry a story that couldn’t keep you invested in the first place. The book couldn’t maintain the tension and interest of the first chapter. It was a bold choice to put the big reveal up front, but it was misguided. There’s simply not enough to build on, and it nullifies any future tension the book could have.  

Hopefully, Peter Swanson’s next book will keep the focus on an interesting story, rather than an “innovative” approach. 

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