Kill Your Darlings by Peter Swanson REVIEW

Summary:

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.

My Thoughts:

This was an interesting read. From the beginning, we know that Wendy wants to kill Thom, and she does, but the novel takes us back in time to the reason they were together in the first place. Wendy and Thom dated in middle school until he moved away. When they meet again years later, they hatch a plan to kill her husband together so that she can get his money and can marry Thom. Years later, Thom is struggling with the guilt of what he did and not being able to talk about it with anyone else, prompting him to write a fictionalized version of what happened, which sends Wendy over the edge.

I enjoyed the writing and the story, but it is a bit lackluster when it comes to Thom's character development. He seems like a one dimensional character despite being important in the overarching story.

My Rating: 3 stars