The Kind Worth Killing by Peter Swanson - Book Reviews

Overall Book club rating - 2.5/5

Anne's Book Rating 2/5

This book is in the thriller genre which is not my favourite read although there are exceptions. However, "A Kind Worth Killing' is not one of them. The plot, written from different angles. carries the reader along with some desire to discover the outcome. Nevertheless, the characters are almost all quite repellent so I found it impossible to have any sympathy with them or for them. It was reviewed as being 'very dark' and I agree with this. Not a book upon which to dwell once finished.

Col's Book Rating 3/5

The proposition put forward in this entertaining, lively and sometimes plain daft thriller is that anyone who betrays their partner or who is unfaithful, anyone who steals someone else’s boyfriend and anyone who verbally gives someone unwanted sexual attention, deserves to be killed. Anyone who is married to someone who has wealth should murder their partner to get hold of their money. And if you feel your marriage has come to an end you should murder your spouse instead of going through a time consuming and expensive divorce. In addition should you manage to persuade someone to do your murdering for you, once the deed is done you then have to murder the murderer. 

If this line of thinking ever found its way into real life the World’s population crisis would be solved inside three weeks and that includes time off at weekends. 

 All of the conversations I’ve ever had with strangers in bars have tended to centre around fairly mundane subjects such as the current state of the beer and whether the landlord will switch on the telly for the match, but in Peter Swanson’s world within minutes of meeting a stranger in a bar one of the characters is confessing he wants to murder his wife whereupon the stranger enthusiastically offers to help. More unlikely silliness ensues soon after when a slight 13 year old girl is somehow strong enough to murder a fully grown man by pushing him into a very shallow dried up well and dropping stones on his head; she then covers him and his belongings with more stones and we are expected to believe his body will never be found (really? think of the ooze, the smell, the flies…) 

Yet none of this seems to matter somehow as the overriding sense is that the author knows exactly what his readers want and he dutifully delivers the goods in a breathless 100mph story that fairly rattles along. You want fabulously wealthy people inhabiting a lifestyle you can only ever imagine? Check. You want sex (preferably implied, certainly never detailed)? Check. You want violence (with only a soupcon of gore)? Check. You want lots of killings (nice clean instant deaths, not the rolling-around-in-agony type with mess everywhere)? Check. You want would-be murderers who turn out to be victims and vice versa? Check. You want twists and turns in the plot, some of which will make you feel good about yourself because you can see them coming from a mile away? Check. 

 In spite of the many implausible bits this is an engaging read to a point. The narrative pleasingly alternates and shifts from the murderous wants, needs and fears of first one character then another as the chapters speed past. It’s suspenseful and one is dragged along as things become ever more tense and strained. Never deep or thought provoking, but as a silly yarn that promises a switch-your-brain-off-sit-back-and-enjoy-the-ride type of read I’d half-heartedly recommend it.

Angie's Book Rating 3/5

Be careful who you talk to on a plane journey! You never know how your paths will cross in the future and what it will lead to!

A.J Hawley's Book Rating 2/5

As the volunteer hosting an online book group for Nottinghamshire Libraries, I’ve been asked to review many different books. Although this is only the third group that I’ve hosted since I started working for them, I’ve been lucky to be able to review two times out of three the genre that I prefer. That of crime fiction. The first one, though, I didn’t finish, as it was an Adrian Mole like diary of a writer and it didn’t really lead anywhere. Whereas Peter Swanson’s The kind worth Killing was a bit more like the traditional crime fiction that I’m used to reading for UK crime book club or my own work. 

However, sadly this one didn’t really do it for me and I actually put the book down twice and if I wasn’t hosting the group I don’t think that I’d have finished it. Although the premise of the book was an intriguing one, I’d already read or seen adaptations of much better attempts at doing this with Highsmith’s Strangers on a Train. When two apparent strangers meet at an airport, they start discussing their lives over drinks and the first of the characters says that he wants to kill his wife and the other offers to help him out, but she has a complex past which makes her experienced in this. Soon you become aware of this and the tensions build up as you wonder whether they will actually kill anybody. But my incredulity got stretched, as before too long everybody involved in the book is trying to kill somebody. I know with the amount of books I read, I often have to suspend my disbelief, but after a while I was just waiting for the next attempted killing and there wasn’t a lot in-between. Unfortunately, this is not a book that I will be recommending. 

Yesterday, the book group met, with me and three other readers to highlight what they thought of the book. The online portion of the book group is to summarise the book, although the book is openly available to everyone in the county and lots of people seem to follow the group, but not take part in the online discussion part. Of the four people there, I was the only one who regularly reads crime thrillers, but we were all of the same mind. Although one of the other readers mentioned that his incredulity was stretched when characters were on occasion, narrating their own deaths, although I have seen this happen before. I was somewhat surprised, also, to hear that there was a sequel to this book that had already been written, as this book came out, I think in 2015. The chapter was not available on the audio version, though, so I cannot say how viable this will be, but I really didn’t think there was much of an opening for a sequel. As a group we only gave the book 2 stars, with him giving it three.