Title: The Kind Worth Killing
Author(s) Name(s): Peter Swanson
Why You Might Like This Book: Read this book if you enjoy
- slow narration,
- morally ambiguous characters, and
- multiple perspectives.
Who Should Avoid This Book: Avoid this book if you are triggered by or dislike
- cheating and extra-marital affairs,
- lengthy reads, or
- thriller books without many twists and turns.
Rated 4/5 on GoodReads, with so many readers also leaving critical reviews, is The Kind Worth Killing, the second thriller novel by Peter Swanson, worth your time?
Warning: Spoilers ahead! 🙂
To be honest, when I was looking for best-sellers, it was the words in the title, “The Kind Worth Killing” that instantly attracted my attention. The book is written in three different parts. It is also a narration of events by a few different characters in first person. Lily is a small-town librarian and Ted Severson is a Harvard-graduated, intelligent, and rich businessman. The two meet on a flight, where they begin talking to each other. Each has their own past, and all of this is revealed to us little by little, one chapter at a time. But Ted’s most recent incident in his personal life, one that has been weighing him down, is that his wife Miranda Severson has been cheating on him with their builder Brad, who has been working with them to build their luxurious new home in Maine. As drunken Ted begins sharing his feelings with his flight mate and new friend Lily, to his surprise, she proposes that his wife should be killed because of what she has done to him, and if he really wants to do that, she would gladly help him.
While this sets the premise for the story, who is Lily? Why does she offer to help a stranger commit a murder, and that too, with so much confidence? We get answers to some of these questions, as we are also told about Lily’s past in first person. As anyone can guess, she is not an ordinary woman. This red-haired, slender and tall, mysterious woman has a dark past, and murder is not something new to her.
In paper, the plot does sound suspenseful, but you read several chapters, and still, you are left wondering if there will ever be a “thrilling moment” in this book. There are some twists and turns, but none of them really shock you. There are also many questions that don’t have answers, like why would or how could Ted trust a random stranger when any normal adult in that position would rather not share their woes with strangers, and even if they did, they would certainly not agree to murder someone with the help of a stranger who asks for nothing in return?
“An instant classic”, says author Lee Child. “Very dark and twisted”, says Paula Hawkins. “Gripping, elegantly and stylishly written and extremely hard to put down”, says Sophie Hannah. Hmm … Really? As a loyal thriller reader, one part of you might want to put the book away because there is nothing intriguing there for what feels like too many chapters, yet another part of you might want to keep reading because well, a good child is one who does not waste the food on their plate, and a good reader is one who does not abandon books they have bought or borrowed. If you can keep going, ignoring the bland style of narration, without anything punchy, you will come across unexpected murders, well-planned and well-executed murders, and failed ones. Slowly, the book gets interesting from Part-2.
Most events that happen until this point are either too predictable or not surprising at best. While Lily’s mostly stoic personality, which she has always maintained from her childhood days, before and after the murders she has committed, makes the character interesting, the indifferent writing style that goes so much into detail about the landscapes, environment, and areas but fails to get into such details when it comes to different human emotions, not just for Lily but for any character in the book could be a reason why the book isn’t engaging. The absence of humour and romance don’t help either when the main mystery element itself isn’t satisfying enough. But thankfully, you would be able to feel the change as you move from part 1 to part 2. It could even feel as though part 1 and the remaining two parts of the book were written by two different authors, if not in terms of the emotional aspect, at least in terms of the mystery aspect.
Surprisingly, your interest could peak towards the end, where you are left wondering if the murderer would finally get caught or not, what all evidence there is in favour and what all could come out of this investigation? More than the murdering of people, it’s the end, where the reader is left wondering what will happen to the murderer and if there are anymore twists here that one can expect that contribute to the “mystery” of the plot, which also seem to make up for the not very exciting revelations in the first half of the book.
Lily Hayward and Detective Henry Kimball seem to be the only interesting characters in the book, and all other characters, no matter how much important they are for the plot and how often we learn about them, there really is nothing impressive about anyone. And even for these main characters, we just learn about certain unique personality quirks that make them unique, and that is all. For the average reader, there is not one character they could feel connected to, be it the apathetic murderer whose goals we do not understand or the husband being cheated on, who is so confused that he agrees to receive help from a stranger who offers to help him murder his wife, or the selfish, immoral wife who decides just like that that she is unhappy with her husband one day and whose goals or plans also we don’t know of yet, or the big, tough lover boy who could be easily manipulated anyone and wouldn’t ask questions, or the detective who is romantic and writes dirty poetry, or the detective who is straight, attractive, single, and celibate for some reason, or the author/father, or the naive mother, and so on. Add to this the nonchalant style of narration and twists and turns that aren’t powerful enough to make you feel interested, for most of the book, you, the reader might also feel bored. But thanks to the parts of the story towards the end, where the reader is made to feel curious about who would win in this battle and what to expect next, finally, there is something interesting for the reader, alright, so your patience and efforts would probably pay off? This is a dark and twisted novel, one that might interest you if you could be patient and you are not looking for any fast-paced stories.
On the whole, Peter Swanson’s The Kind Worth Killing is somewhat boring and somewhat amusing, but surely, both the story and the writing could be way better, and most of the reviews of this book by some best-selling thriller authors seem to be serious exaggerations.
