The Kind Worth Killing / Crooked House

I really enjoyed Peter Swanson’s mystery thriller All The Beautiful Lies, and one of my favorite parts was when bookseller Bill recommends The Secret History, before dying in an “accident” that’s oddly similar to the “accident” in the novel. The Kind Worth Killing is another Swanson thriller with classic mysteries as foreshadowing.   There’s a moment when Lily is reading the Agatha Christie mystery, Crooked House, which just happened to be the book I’d read just before The Kind Worth Killing. This isn’t a modernization or retelling of the Christie mystery at all — but the some of the themes and the mood of Crooked House bled through. The awful bit about the cat, Hayward Senior’s discussion of a child who must be told that murder is wrong, but doesn’t quite feel it, the unsupervised little girl with her own agenda, and the characters who are conscious of a murder-mystery’s beats.

In The Kind Worth Killing, a chance meeting on a plane sets the plot in motion, very Strangers on a Train. After too many airport martinis with a random stranger, Ted tells her he’d like to kill his cheating wife. The stranger, Lily, responds with her belief that some people just deserve killing and murder’s not that bad. And before they land in Boston, a dark plan is starting…

I enjoy suspense fiction in general, but this one stood out because Lily is such a weirdly practical murderer, with her own (twisted, dark) logic behind her (twisted, dark) actions. You start out thinking this is about to be a psychopath story, clearly Lily doesn’t see the world like most people do. But then as the story unfolds, her victims are revealed as horrible people, and you don’t really feel badly when they meet their ends. You’re not really rooting for Lily either, though, this book isn’t about caring for a character and wanting good things for them, it’s more of a wild ride of what could possibly happen next.

There’s a high body count in The Kind Worth Killing, but it’s not very gross. I was thinking more about how the character’s gonna get away with a murder than being disgusted by the blood. Some of the secondary deaths are collateral damage in kind of a Christie way — the murderer has to off other people to cover their tracks or silence witnesses. Again, it’s not derivative as much as the themes and some of the beats work extra well if you’ve just finished Crooked House. I’m trying to keep that as spoiler-free as possible since this really is the kind of novel where uncovering is the whole point.

Another twisty and dark story, with references to Agatha Christie and Patricia Highsmith novels setting the mood.