Swanson’s new thriller fiendishly fantastic

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 25/03/2023 (1285 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Joan isn’t yet evil Joan when she walks into the office of New England private eye Henry Kimball to hire him to confirm her husband Richard is cheating with Pam, an employee in his real estate office, who’s also a friend of evil Joan’s. Pause for breath.

She wants Henry to confirm the adulterous trysting — no need for photos or DNA, no hot and heavy recordings, no naughtiness… just confirm it, she tells Henry. Or rather, she tells Mr. Kimball — he was once her high school English teacher back when Joan was a really smart student, a champion gymnast and really nice to everyone.

Kimball needs the money, no longer a high school English teacher, and no longer a cop either. He gets on the easy-to-follow trail immediately, getting close to Pam, getting way too close to Pam, getting so close to Pam that — OK, let’s get to the gunshots. They ring out as Henry approaches the vacant listing where the cheating couple go to cheat, and that’s when our plot takes off.

It’s a given there will be murders; this is a Peter Swanson murder mystery, the ninth by the diabolically clever American author. Swanson penned the brilliant Eight Perfect Murders, in which the owner of a small independent bookshop helps the FBI sleuth a series of murders which use the plot of eight classic murder mysteries in which the killer gets away with it.

Here Swanson keeps flashing us back to young teen Joan’s being dragged along by her parents to a summer seaside resort, which is so like, totally, you know, boooorrrring.

There, Joan draws the attention of an older boy, an arrogant, bullying, loutish fellow named Duane, who hits on her and tries to rape her on a lonely, dark beach.

Duane shares a resort room with his nerdy loser cousin, who hangs out in the library, where he meets Joan, soon to become evil Joan. They fantasize what it might be like to commit murder — to kill someone who deserves it and get away with it.

Back to our present, where Swanson fills us in bit by tantalizing bit on why Henry is no longer a high school English teacher. One day, a punk nobody liked pulled out a gun in class, killed a popular girl, then killed himself.

That traumatized Henry, over whose head a light bulb now clicks, and he recalls Joan was in that class. She was there, that day, in the classroom, and the murdered girl had been her BFF.

Finally, there’s why Henry is no longer a police officer. He was infatuated with Lily, who may have killed and disappeared people the planet was infinitely better off without. When Henry closed in, she stabbed him.

In Swanson’s earlier books, Henry hadn’t turned her in based on what he knows about bodies at the bottom of an abandoned well. And while she didn’t reciprocate his love, Lily and Henry have an ongoing close friendship.

Complicated much?

Then there’s the role poetry plays in unravelling the clues, and then there’s evil Joan’s good sister. After the aforementioned gunshots, Henry starts to realize evil Joan seems to be right in the middle of a series of fatal tragedies. Yikes.

The Kind Worth Saving is an astonishing humdinger, and Swanson is beyond amazing. And devious. Like Anthony Horowitz, messing with your head and demanding you pay attention, but much nastier. A whole lot nastier.

Peter, these books are fiction, right? They’re not autobiographical?

Retired Free Press reporter Nick Martin is a nerd who likes libraries. But he never ran into evil Joan in the Stephen King section. At least, that’s his story and he’s sticking to it.