Kill Your Darlings

A Novel

De: Peter Swanson

Narrado por: Steven Weber

“A dazzlingly clever murder mystery, told backwards, asking the question: why would this loving wife murder her husband?”—Gillian McAllister, New York Times bestselling author of Famous Last Words and Wrong Place Wrong Time

From the New York Times bestselling author of The Kind Worth Killing and Eight Perfect Murders comes an inventive, utterly propulsive murder-mystery in reverse, tracing a marriage back in time to uncover the dark secret at its heart.

Audiobook narrated by Steven Weber!

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.

©2025 Peter Swanson (P)2025 HarperCollins Publishers

I liked it.

After I finished I found myself wanting to go back to the beginning to remind myself of how it all began. It's strange listening to the story in reverse. I enjoyed the book, but found myself wishing for more. More of a twist, more of a mystery, just a bit more of something. I did like it though and it was worth a credit.

The order of the chapters??

I am convinced that they messed up putting the chapters together. There were sections that repeated and the ending was so anticlimactic. It’s a shame, because the story would have been good otherwise.

Unique

Peter Swanson is one of my favorite authors and I’ve loved all his books thus far. I gave this one 4 stars because it’s my least favorite, but it was still good, the performance was GREAT, and the ending was perfection. I definitely recommend.

I’m a big fan of Swanson

Interesting concept. Very well performed [and there’s that 15 word minimum again blah blah blah ].

Great writing, great premise, great narration.

Glad I came across an interview with this author on NPR. I’ll now read all his other works.

Clever idea but a tedious listen

The story is clever but the telling is tedious and repetitive. The twist at the very end is a small redemption.

Enjoyed, but the author might be annoyed

I know the author worked hard on the structure. So pardon my violation of his intention but I'm old and tired of convention deconstructions.

Sure, Memento was great but efforts after that mostly felt clunky with the method an over-engineered way to surprise by misdirection when a straightforward narrative would be blasé. The Seinfeld reverse episode was curious the first time I watched; but for a re-watch I wished they had a re-edited conventional version available.

So for this novel I listened to about one third of chapter one and then dropped down to the bottom. I listened to the rest in temporal order (last chapter first and so on) ending with listening to the whole of chapter one. Fortunately, the chapter structure in the audiobook permits this interference with the author's intention.

Importantly, I can report that the book works fine this way. And that's a tribute to the author in that this is not the case for stories where reversion is merely a gimmick to spice up a boring narrative.

Skip this one

Was hard to follow. When switching timelines, some sort of signal may have helped. That said, it wasn't interesting enough to read again now that I know.

Wanted to like it more than I did

The story elements are decent enough but the structure, intriguing at first, feels like a mistake by the end. There's a payoff, a subtle and devious revelation, but it's not enough of a wow moment to justify Swanson's experiment.

That said, I'll keep reading everything he puts out, hoping he'll write another book as good as The Kind Worth Killing.

Clever

This was clever I understood what the author was trying to do. It wasn’t the best book I’ve ever read, but still worth a listen.