If there is anyone I trust to write a wacky psychological thriller with dark and devious characters with no clear idea of whether they’re good or bad, it’s Peter Swanson. In his traditional style, he has concocted another jarring tale of murder and betrayal in The Kind Worth Saving.
Henry Kimball is a private eye who is hired by a woman he once taught as a high school teacher to confirm her suspicions about her husband committing adultery. A simple investigation that turns horribly dark when he becomes a witness to a murder of two individuals. With his instincts nagging at him, he takes a deeper look into her student, Joan, where incongruities start surfacing. Known for his obsessions getting the best of him, Kimball sets down another rabbit hole but he may not get out of this one alive.
Peter Swanson is unbelievably adept at crafting plot twists within plot twists and linking them in a manner that doesn’t lose your attention even a tiny bit. There is a sinister twang to his prose that seeps into you as much as it does into the characters and opens you up to consider darkly intriguing possibilities about the whodunit narrative, almost like you are untangling the web of mystery with Henry Kimball. Personally, there’s another character I loved even more than Kimball and that is Lily Kinter, the mastermind from Swanson’s The Kind Worth Killing. If you haven’t read it, you’ll best enjoy this one after reading its predecessor as the dynamic of Kimball and Kinter follows very closely from its events. Lily Kinter compliments Kimball as a dark knight willing to go to depths that Kimball’s white knight can’t possibly fathom in order to truly crack this case open without any official jurisdiction, given that Lily mirrors Joan so closely they might as well have been the same persons, except for a few nuances which are highlighted brilliantly by Peter Swanson to present a nerve wrecking battle of wits between two murderers.
Clever, dangerous, and addictive, The Kind Worth Saving is one doozy of a thriller that pairs you with genuine characters and palpable circumstances that will keep you coming back for more. Peter Swanson continues to impress with his ingenious affairs of double crosses and murders.
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Purchase The Kind Worth Saving
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Barrington Books
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