Kill Your Darlings Audiobook By Peter Swanson cover art

Kill Your Darlings

A Novel

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Kill Your Darlings

By: Peter Swanson
Narrated by: Steven Weber
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About this listen

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.

©2025 Peter Swanson (P)2025 HarperCollins Publishers
Genre Fiction Literary Fiction Psychological Suspense Thriller & Suspense Marriage Heartfelt Crime Murder
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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.

I liked it.

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I know the author worked hard on the structure. So pardon my violation of his intention but I'm old and tired of convention deconstructions.

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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The story elements are decent enough but the structure, intriguing at first, feels like a mistake by the end. There's a payoff, a subtle and devious revelation, but it's not enough of a wow moment to justify Swanson's experiment.

That said, I'll keep reading everything he puts out, hoping he'll write another book as good as The Kind Worth Killing.

Wanted to like it more than I did

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I love Peter Swanson but this book..I could not get into it and it did not make a lasting imprint in me like most of his books did. Maybe I need to try it again but it seriously was like drivel 😳😑

Not a hit for me

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I have no idea what is happening. In theory this is a cool concept but poorly executed, choppy and nonsensical. I usually adore his writing style and his stories but this is a flop.

Not even finished yet

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