Peter Swanson’s latest arsenic-dunked thriller begins: “The first attempt at killing her husband was the night of the dinner party.” The husband is Thom, a lecturer at New Essex State University. His wife – and would be killer – is published poet Wendy. The pair have been married for forty years and Wendy has had enough of Thom: the drinking, the affairs, the lack of any real connection. Except – except! – that is not strictly true. The pair do have a connection – a secret that has kept them bound together since its dark inception many years ago. In a bravura flourish, Swanson then gives us a novel in reverse. ‘Kill Your Darlings’ begins in 2023 and then the chapters dip back through the years until we reach the black heart of Wendy and Thom’s relationship. Of course, such a narrative sleight of hand has been pulled before. One only has to think of Martin Amis’s Booker-nominated ‘Time’s Arrow’ (Swanson gives a nod to Amis by giving him a brief cameo). Such a device, however, has rarely been pulled off in a thriller, but Swanson manages it here while still providing readers with all the requisite thrills. It’s also a book fizzing with moral ambiguities. “Good things should be balanced by bad things, and vice versa” one of the characters muses, a notion that’s poked and prodded at all the way through the narrative. As I neared the end, I worried that Swanson wouldn’t be able to stick the landing but he does and how. RM

Faber