Kill Your Darlings

A Novel

By: Peter Swanson

Narrated by: Steven Weber

“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.

An AudioFile Earphones Award winner, this audiobook is superbly narrated by Steven Weber.

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.

Peter Swanson is a great story teller

I really liked this book. I wish it was longer and I didn’t love the ending but such a good listen

I liked it.

After I finished I found myself wanting to go back to the beginning to remind myself of how it all began. It's strange listening to the story in reverse. I enjoyed the book, but found myself wishing for more. More of a twist, more of a mystery, just a bit more of something. I did like it though and it was worth a credit.

Loved

I am a very big fan of Peter Swanson and the performance of this book by Steven Webster is top notch. I went back after I finished this and re-listened to the start of it and I found that helped deepen the book for me. There are a lot of seeds planted but the reverse order of the timeline makes them a bit harder to catch, but once you see them, it's pretty great.

really well written and excellent narrator

I had to listen to the first few chapters again after finishing this one. I really enjoyed it!

The order of the chapters??

I am convinced that they messed up putting the chapters together. There were sections that repeated and the ending was so anticlimactic. It’s a shame, because the story would have been good otherwise.