I Just Read About That…

[LISTENED TO: June 2023] The Kind Worth Killing

I had enjoyed Peter Swanson’s Eight Perfect Murders so much that I wanted to get more audio books by him.  I had heard that he was creating a sequel to one of his popular books, but I didn’t know which one.  It turns out it was this one.

So this seemed like a good one to start with.

As it opened, I absolutely hated it.  It may have been Johnny Heller’s voice, which I did not like.  Although it also sounded familiar and I wondered if I knew him from reading a children’s book and I didn’t like him in an adult role.

Why did I hate it?  Because within the first few minutes, his character, Ted Severson says something to the effect of, “My wife cheated on me.  So I have to kill her.”  I mean, who the hell thinks like that?  And who bases an entire book on that?  That is psychopathic.

Interestingly, I have read many complaints about Swanson’s bland characters, and while I’m not sure they are bland, exactly, they are certainly deadpan or flat or disinterested.  At least that’s how the narrators read them.

So when Karen White took over as narrator for Lily Kintner’s parts, I enjoyed the book more.  Lily was a flat character, but I found her dispassionate voice to be kind of interesting. 

The book alternates between Ted and Lily for pretty much all of the first half.

So, Ted meets Lily on a flight home to Boston (he is in England for business, she is in England because her father has accidentally killed someone in a car accident and is in prison).  After a few drinks they play a game of truth.

This struck me as utterly nonsensical and unbelievable.  Especially how quickly they reveal deep seated truths about themselves.  It turns out that the unbelievableness of it is because we hear it from Ted’s point of view.  Once we hear Lily’s side of it, the “game” makes more sense.

When Ted admits that he wants to kill his wife, Lily encourages him from the start.  Because, as she says

“I don’t think murder is necessarily as bad as people make it out to be. Everyone dies. What difference does it make if a few bad apples get pushed along a little sooner than God intended? And your wife, for example, seems like the kind worth killing.”

So he wants to kill his wife for cheating on him.  And she thinks murder is just fine.

When Lily’s backstory is revealed, I thought, what the hell is up with Swanson.  First he wants to kill the guy’s wife for cheating on him.  Then we find out that Lily was sexually abused as a teenager and her parents were dismissive, borderline absent.  And Lily has some dark secrets of her own.

There’s a number of twists and surprises in this book and it’s kind of hard to talk about the characters without spoiling something.

And, having said that, that was the saving grace in this book.  The twist and utterly unexpected moments were incredible.  I was shocked and surprised quite often as the book progresses and that’s why I kept listening.

After the middle of the book, we start to hear from Miranda, Ted’s wife’s, point of view, as read by Kathleen Early.

Incidentally, these two women narrators were excellent–their command of male voices was fantastic and I could have easily listened to them do all of the male voices instead of the actual male readers.

We learn about her past and how she got involved with the guy she is cheating on.  He is their contractor, Brad, a local guy who is kinda dumb and seems somehow beneath her.

As the first part ends, we learn that everything is not what we thought with Ted and Miranda.  And Miranda has been planning something of her own (beyond sleeping with Brad).

There’s some double crosses as Miranda catches on to what Lily is up to (and again, I give Swanson a lot of credit for the ways these two stories interweaved).  And, with the multiple narrators, Swanson is able to really throw some surprises into the mix.

The final narrator is Keith Szarabajka who reads from the point of view of Detective Henry Kimball.  Kimball is a Boston detective. This whole story is crazy and messy and although things seems pretty neat and tidy, he feels like Lily is lying, so he decides to investigate her further.

He thinks he’s on to something when Lily has one last surprise for him.

And just when you think the book is done, the final line is just perfect.

So, how do I go from hating a book to loving the end?  It all comes down to the characters.  Why are they all so reprehensible?

It seems like once you start killing, you just get a real taste for it and have to do it more and more.  I wonder if that’s true.

Could he have written a story like this with less terrible characters?  I guess.  I mean, could something more have pushed him to want to kill his wife rather than just divorcing her? I would think so.  Could he have been less of an asshole?  Probably.

Am I too sensitive to read murder mysteries?  Very likely.

Could he write about characters that are any worse than these?  YES!  Like in the next book I listened to by him.