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Sunday 11 January 2015

'The Kind Worth Killing' by Peter Swanson - SPOILER FREE REVIEW


'The Kind Worth Killing' doesn't come out until February the 3rd, so I'm going to post a review with no spoilers, and then sometime around the 10th - when it's already been out for a week - I'll make a post with all of my thoughts about the spoilery events, so if you're interested in that keep an eye out! 
'The Kind Worth Killing' is a thriller, so if you normally follow my blog for my young adult book reviews this one probably won't interest you, but I've always been a fan of thrillers and murder mysteries, so when I saw the ARC of this in a charity shop back in December, I couldn't resist picking it up.
This is a book told in three parts, split into four different perspectives over those three parts. Part one features Ted and Lily, two people who meet in an airport lounge and spend the flight discussing how he can kill his wife, who is having an affair with the general contractor on the new home that they are building. The second part follows Miranda, Ted's wife, and Lily, while the third part follows Lily and Detective Kimball. 
When I first started this book I absolutely loved it - the entire first part that is Ted and Lily's perspectives really grabbed me, because I really enjoyed both of their characters. Ted was obviously struggling with the moral decision of whether or not to kill his wife: wanting to, because she was cheating on him, but also apprehensive because he did love her at one point during their marriage. On the other hand, Lily's chapters were wholly engrossing and captivating, telling us the stories of her past and the two people she had already killed, giving us her reasons why and how she managed to get away with both of them for over ten years. 
However, moving on to part two, I just didn't really like Miranda's perspective. I know the whole point was that we were supposed to hate her, but her arrogance and her self-importance really turned me off, making me want to skip through her chapters. It was impressive to have two strong female voices, as most of the thrillers I've read in the past have consistently had males as their focal points, so that was refreshing at least. Similarly, part three with Detective Kimball started off well but just seemed to unravel quite quickly - things happened that didn't seem likely looking at the events of the book that had already unfolded, so it just seemed like a really odd way to wrap things up. 
I won't give any more away, because this is a book that you really need to go into without getting spoilers, but I do recommend you get hold of a copy as soon as you can because it was a really interesting books with some twists that I did not expect, even though there were some that I did see coming. Overall I definitely enjoyed the novel; the debate between whether killing could ever be moral was interesting and it definitely made you think. Not the best thriller I've read, but definitely one of the most intriguing.  

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