About
Peter Swanson
Peter is the Sunday Times and New York Times best selling author of 11 novels, including The Kind Worth Killing, winner of the New England Society Book Award, and finalist for the CWA Ian Fleming Steel Dagger, Her Every Fear, an NPR book of the year. His books have been translated into over 30 languages, and his stories, poetry, and features have appeared in Asimov’s Science Fiction, The Atlantic Monthly, Measure, The Guardian, The Strand Magazine, and Yankee Magazine.
A graduate of Trinity College, the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, and Emerson College, he lives on the North Shore of Massachusetts with his wife.
Coming Soon
Available June 10, 2025
Kill Your Darlings
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.
An ingenious twist on a noir classic... Swanson's decision to move swiftly backward in time over 40-plus years is surprisingly suspenseful. I raced through the pages, anxious to learn the couple's last deadly secret — and I was not disappointed."
A feat of structural magnificence — the instant I turned the final page, I flipped straight back to the start to put it all together again. Exhilarating and exceptionally clever, Kill Your Darlings zings with a singular sense of tension."
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“Kill Your Darlings: A Novel”
(Swanson) is one of the cleverest talents in contemporary genre fiction."