The Kind Worth Killing

Starred review from December 8, 2014
Revenge has rarely been served colder than in Swanson’s exceptional thriller, his second standalone after 2013’s The Girl with a Clock for a Heart. When Ted Severson, a wealthy Boston entrepreneur, and Lily Kintner, an attractive archivist at Winslow College outside Boston, meet by chance in a Heathrow airport lounge, they trade intimate secrets: Ted wants to kill his unfaithful wife, Miranda—and Lily, who’s about Miranda’s age, wants to help. Unbeknownst to Ted, Lily has made a career of dispassionate homicide, at one point musing, “to take another life was, in many ways, the greatest expression of what it meant to be alive.” While Ted and Lily hatch their devious scheme back in Boston, police detective Henry Kimball tries to untangle the web of deceit that surrounds Lily. With scalpel-sharp prose, Swanson probes the nature of cold-blooded evil. Few will be prepared for the crushing climax. Agent: Nat Sobel, Sobel Weber Associates.

September 15, 2014

Swanson's rivetingly creepy The Girl with a Clock for a Heart was declared crime fiction's best first novel of 2014 by the Washington Post and has been optioned for film. In his new work, also optioned, Ted Severson is flying from London to Boston when he gets into an intense tete-a-tete with striking but enigmatic Lily Kintner, finally blurting out that he could just kill his wife. When Lily coolly replies that she'd like to help, a murder plot is born. With a 50,000-copy first printing.

Copyright 2014 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

January 1, 2015
A chance airport meeting between strangers sets in motion a Strangers on a Train-inspired murder plot. During a delay at Heathrow, wealthy Boston businessman Ted Severson shares drinks with fellow American Lily Kintner, an archivist at a small Massachusetts college. One thing leads to another, but instead of sleeping together, the two confess their deepest secrets: Ted wants to kill his two-timing wife, Miranda, and Lily wants to help him. In case the Patricia Highsmith connection isn't blatant enough, Swanson (The Girl With a Clock for a Heart, 2014) shows Lily reading The Two Faces of January-"not one of her best"-in the airport. While the title implies that Ted's (and Lily's) enemies are the kind worth killing, the reader almost immediately decides it's the cold, heartless protagonists who should ultimately get the ax. Miranda is indeed cheating on Ted with Brad Daggett, the handsome and dim contractor who's building the couple's extravagant Maine vacation home, yet it's hard to feel sorry for a man who tells a complete stranger that he fantasizes about killing his spouse, let alone a woman who openly encourages such behavior. Lily's past is slowly, predictably revealed, and we discover her penchant for violence, but instead of making her character more complex, it merely becomes another layer of frustration. While there are twists, most of them are so clearly telegraphed that only the most careless of readers won't see what's coming, especially since Swanson needlessly doubles back over the same events from different points of view.

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January 1, 2015
Ted Severson meets Lily Kintner in an airport bar, and their time-wasting flirtation turns serious when he admits that he's just caught his wife cheating. A little drunk, he recklessly claims that he'd like to kill her and is shocked when Lily agrees that he should. Lily pegs his wife as the kind of person who spreads misery, the kind worth killing. After Ted spends the flight exploring Lily's simple philosophy of justice, he allows her reckless comment to morph into a murder plot motivated by hurt and a new infatuation. But instead of earning his version of twisted justice, Ted's plot plunges him into a calculating, murderous game initiated years ago at a small New England university. Boston PD Detective Kimball is another late arrival to the game, and his surprising success at sensing Lily's darkness ups the stakes. Swanson successfully revisits the femme fatale theme of his first novel, The Girl with a Clock for a Heart (2014), in this twisty tale of warring sociopaths, which makes a good companion to similar stories by Laura Lippman and Gillian Flynn.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2015, American Library Association.)