The Kind Worth Killing

Author: Peter Swanson

Rating: 2/5

Ted Severnson meets Lily at an airport when their flight to Boston is delayed. When Ted tells her about his cheating wife, she has a most unlikely solution: murder.

Spoilers ahead.

Detailed Summary

The book starts with Ted and Lily at a bar in Heathrow Airport. They also sit next to each other during the plane flight (in the BUSINESS CLASS section). Ted rants to her about his wife named Miranda who’s cheating on him with Brad Dagget, the guy who’s designing their new house. So Lily is all like, “Let’s murder her,” and Ted is all like, “YES. That is the answer to my problem.” They make plans to meet up. Lily is the daughter of a famous author. Her parents used to have boarders and one of them was this guy named Chet who was attracted to her. She was fourteen at the time. She killed him and dumped him into a well. Then at college, she stole Faith’s boyfriend, Eric, and then Faith stole Eric back. When Eric visits her in London, she murders him as revenge by giving him nuts (Eric was allergic to nuts). Faith is actually Miranda, Ted’s wife. So yep, connections. Anyway, Ted is this really rich guy who works in the computer business (?) and he went to Harvard and did I mention he was uber rich? ‘Cause he is. Good looking too, apparently. So Lily and Ted make plans to kill both Brad and Miranda. They sort of fall in love. Then Brad kills Ted.

Turns out, Miranda has been using Brad all this time to kill Ted. Detective Kimball is on the case. All signs point to Brad. Lily convinces Brad to help her kill Miranda. He does. Then Lily kills Brad by wrapping a wire around his neck and dumps him in the well where she had dumped Chet. Lily’s parents live together again (they had gotten a divorce). Kimball is suspicious of Lily so he follows her everywhere. Lily realises she’s being followed and stabs him with a knife saying, “I’m sorry.” Kimball’s partner, this woman named Detective James, was keeping tabs on Kimball and manages to arrest Lily and save Kimball. Lily is interrogated and she says Kimball was freaking her out which is why she stabbed him (that wasn’t the real reason obviously–he was onto her). Kimball writes these really perverted limericks and those are found. The book ends with uncertainty. Lily gets a letter from her father saying the meadow where the well is will be renovated or something.

Plot and Pacing: Oh my goodness. This book was terrible. Worth killing, if I may say so myself. I didn’t like the premise to start with. I can think of a million better solutions to Ted’s problem than murder. I also abhorred the characters but I’ll get into that later. The book is pretty fast-paced as it should be (it’s of the thriller genre). But since the whole book rests on that premise–the whole murder fiasco–I went along with it.

But then everyone kept getting murdered! I thought killing Ted off was an interesting plot twist. However, that escalated quickly so that Miranda was killed, Brad was killed and then Kimball was almost killed. Do we really need so much killing in this world? I also felt Kimball was painstakingly slow in fitting together the puzzle pieces. Given Lily’s record, it’s pretty clear that she had played some part in the whole scheme.

The ending is weird. I think Swanson left it open-ended in case there was demand for a sequel. I think Lily would probably get caught for the murders of Chet and Brad.

Anyway, the main reason I didn’t like this book was the characters. Okay, also the writing style. Characters first.

Characters: Why is everyone good looking in this book? All the women have slender bodies, intense eyes, nice hair etc. All the men (except for Brad) are tall, muscular and have big eyes with long lashes. And they’re all bloody rich! Gosh! How unrealistic is that? And Swanson makes it a point to comment on how wonderful they look ALL the damn time.

I couldn’t relate to any of the characters either. I thought Lily was pretty cool at first because she liked reading Nancy Drew. That didn’t last long. I hated how she was so indifferent to everything. She had no feelings. She was this cold, dark person. Oh, but wait, she has wonderful long red hair and a pale complexion and a slender body and intense green eyes! That totally makes up for it!

Miranda was also just ugh. I hate people like her who use others to get what they want. I did, however, find it interesting that she hated being judged by her appearance. Brad was an imbecile. Ted was decent, I guess. Kimball was kind of creepy. You know, the only good character in this book was Detective James. (Swanson spends a lot of time describing her long legs.) I liked her no-nonsense attitude and I was relieved when Lily got caught.

And with this wonderful cast of characters, most have the same answer to every problem: murder. Miranda orchestrates Ted’s murder because she hears him snore and realises she doesn’t want to spend fifty years listening to someone snore. Lily murders Chet for molesting her, Eric for cheating on her, and finally Miranda because she was the one who Eric cheated on her with. Ted plots a murder because his wife is cheating on him. Brad murders people to be with Miranda. How messed up is that?

Honestly, I’m just glad I finished the book. I really hated all the characters.

Writing Style: The writing wasn’t bad per se but it wasn’t great either. First-person narration can be tricky to write. Swanson seemed to narrate every single action the characters took. Not only that, there would be huge info-dumping sessions which I couldn’t care less about. All the characters sounded exactly the same. If it weren’t for the chapter titles, I would have no idea who was narrating.

I guess one good thing about the writing was its straightforwardness. There were info-dumps but at least those dumps were easy to follow. That’s all I can think of.

My school librarian recommended it to me and when I said I didn’t like it, he was pretty disappointed. Oh well.