Kill Your Darlings
ByPublisher Description
“A dazzlingly clever murder mystery, told backwards, asking the question: why would this loving wife murder her husband?”—Gillian McAllister, New York Times bestselling author of Famous Last Words and Wrong Place Wrong Time
From the New York Times bestselling author of The Kind Worth Killing and Eight Perfect Murders comes an inventive, utterly propulsive murder-mystery in reverse, tracing a marriage back in time to uncover the dark secret at its heart.
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.
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Meet readers like you in the Fable For You feed, designed to build bookish communitiesKill Your Darlings Reviews
“Kill Your Darlings — Peter Swanson (2025)
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⭐️ Rating: 7.5/10
🌶️ Spice: 0.5/5
📋 Genre: Thriller
📕 Format: Hardback
📄 Page Count: 272
⌛️ Read Time: 2 Days
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NO-SPOILERS SUMMARY:
Although Thom and Wendy Graves have been married for nearly thirty years, sharing a beautiful home on the New England shore and a son who is now grown and out on his own, it’s no secret that they aren’t the perfect couple. Especially because Wendy has started envisioning her life without Thom, and she is wondering if she could get away with killing him and starting her life anew.
Why not just divorce him? Because Wendy and Thom share secrets so dark it would destroy their lives if they came to light. And Thom, with his increasingly heavy drinking and loud mouth amongst friends, is starting to concern Wendy.
Told in reverse chronological order, this story begins with the end and works backwards, detailing Thom and Wendy’s tempestuous relationship through all their important life milestones, layering the pieces brick-by-brick to create the full picture of why Wendy would feel murder is her only option.
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REVIEW: (SPOILERS AHEAD!)
I found this one on my library’s new release shelves, and I was immediately intrigued by the blurb! It didn’t quite end up being what I expected, but it had its twisty moments!
🚨 SPOILERS BELOW! 🚨
👍🏼 LIKES:
➕The reverse chronological telling of this story was an interesting and compelling plot device! You meet these characters at the start of the novel in all their complexity, and reverse-engineer them to fit the narrative of why and how they are who they are.
➕The twist on the very last two pages had me absolutely floored!! I had kinda sneaked a peek ahead at the date headers on the chapter breaks, and I was originally really bummed we wouldn’t be getting a jump back to the “present” to see what happens with Wendy, but that twist sealed it!!
👎🏼 DISLIKES:
➖The backwards chronology, while cool, made it somewhat hard for me to correctly piece together the timeline in my head. Especially when it came to the “beginning” of Thom and Wendy’s relationship after college. I had to reread a lot of chapters after the end of sections to line it all up in my mind.
➖Neither Thom nor Wendy were likable characters and I really couldn’t get myself fully invested in their story because I just didn’t care that much about them 🙈 (plus I HATE when it’s spelled “Thom” instead of “Tom” 💀)
➖I really, REALLY hate books with cheating subplots, especially when the person cheating is just so casual and blasé about it.”About Peter Swanson
Peter Swanson is the New York Times bestselling author of The Kind Worth Killing, winner of the New England Society Book Award and finalist for the CWA Ian Fleming Steel Dagger; Her Every Fear, an NPR book of the year; and Eight Perfect Murders, a New York Times bestseller, among others. His books have been translated into 30 languages. He lives on the North Shore of Massachusetts, where he is at work on his next novel.
Other books by Peter Swanson
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