Killer instinct

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 20/07/2024 (760 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Librarian Martha begins to get these nasty little niggling suspicions about what her husband Alan — whom she didn’t take much time getting to know before their marriage — could be up to at all his conventions. Could he be (gasp!) a serial killer?

Now that may not be the first thing most spouses would usually suspect, nor may it be the first untoward thought to occur to book clubbers about how people away from home on their own can be naughty.

Alan seems to be faithful; he sells novelty educational materials to teachers’ math, science and English lit conferences — where, we all know, it’s all business all the time, and after hours it’s all collaboration and sharing best practices and working well with others.

Martha’s Spidey-sense tingles, and the next thing you know she’s scouring internet sources throughout the northeastern U.S., looking for suspicious deaths and ghastly assaults that match up with where Alan has been and when.

Martha decides to contact her university BFF Lily — if you’re a regular Peter Swanson reader, you’ll know Lily is a mysterious loner who occasionally disappears people who really, totally, need killing.

And off we go in Swanson’s devilishly clever 10th murder mystery.

Almost everything beyond this point in the plot is a spoiler, so devious is our Peter. We’ll say only that several characters have been seen before.

His masterpiece so far is Eight Perfect Murders, in which a murderer appears to be copying the plots of eight real-life classic works of noir, in which the killer gets away with it. The FBI enlists the aid of an independent bookseller in a small New England town, who’s blogged about those eight books. A brilliant read.

Seems Swanson does write quite often about murderers getting away with it. He seems to be quite on top of his subject matter — it is fiction, isn’t it, Peter? You’re making all this up, right?

Pause while we all double-bolt our doors and check the windows.

A Talent for Murder doesn’t take us where we think we’re going, which is typical of the most fiendishly unpredictable of murder mystery authors writing at the level of the level of Ruth Ware and Shari Lapena.

Sure, Lily narrates some of the chapters, and appears in many chapters seen from another character’s perspective — think that’s any guarantee she’ll be breathing by book’s end?

To tell you much more would require divulging so many spoilers — nope, not going there.

Swanson is good, really good, though A Talent for Murder isn’t among his very best.

Maybe it’s time to try a couple more standalones, without relying on somewhat familiar characters. And the book is on the short side — an author of this calibre often goes 350 or more pages. It does feel at times as though it’s moving a little fast.

Really, though, the issue is that A Talent for Murder all feels as though it doesn’t grieve for human life cut short violently.

You expect a murder (or murders) in a murder mystery, that comes with the territory. And you can’t expect them to all go the route of Agatha Christie, where even the scoundrels most deserving of being offed die painlessly of poison in their sleep, unaware they’ve been murdered.

A Talent for Murder is fascinated with the act of murder and what makes a murderer tick, not with the terror and agony of an innocent person’s being killed violently, not with the lives changed forever of their loved ones. Know you’re coming to a superb mystery, but not an empathetic one.

If so many American states pay their teachers dreadfully and don’t provide decent classrooms and adequate learning materials, wonders retired Free Press reporter Nick Martin, where’s all the money coming from for professional development conferences and conventions?