
Kill Your Darlings
A Novel
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Narrated by:
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Steven Weber
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By:
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Peter Swanson
“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.
Audiobook 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.
©2025 Peter Swanson (P)2025 HarperCollins PublishersListeners also enjoyed...




















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Unique
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I’m a big fan of Swanson
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Great writing, great premise, great narration.
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I liked it.
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Loved
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The order of the chapters??
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Wendy and Tom met during their eighth grade trip to Washington D.C. bonding over their fascination with the Exorcist. Through the years their paths cross culminating in a secret they own and share. Wendy is a published poet who shares the tremendous inheritance received after her first husband’s death. Tom, an English Lit professor frustrated at trying to write the great American novel, cheats and drinks to excess. Wendy, fearing he might divulge their secret during one of his drunken affairs, has become disgusted with her husband.
A master storyteller, Swanson draws us in and the reader thinks the ending is obvious. It’s not and the last chapter is brilliantly executed.
I give this 5 stars. A psychological study in our relationships deteriorate.
Murder mystery kept me listening
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Clever idea but a tedious listen
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Sure, Memento was great but efforts after that mostly felt clunky with the method an over-engineered way to surprise by misdirection when a straightforward narrative would be blasé. The Seinfeld reverse episode was curious the first time I watched; but for a re-watch I wished they had a re-edited conventional version available.
So for this novel I listened to about one third of chapter one and then dropped down to the bottom. I listened to the rest in temporal order (last chapter first and so on) ending with listening to the whole of chapter one. Fortunately, the chapter structure in the audiobook permits this interference with the author's intention.
Importantly, I can report that the book works fine this way. And that's a tribute to the author in that this is not the case for stories where reversion is merely a gimmick to spice up a boring narrative.
Enjoyed, but the author might be annoyed
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Clever
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