Kill Your Darlings

SOON TO BE A MAJOR FILM STARRING JULIA ROBERTS FROM THE SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLING AUTHOR A FINANCIAL TIMES BEST BOOK OF 2025 'A dazzlingly clever murder mystery, told backwards.' GILLIAN McALLISTER 'Deliciously dark.' JOHN MARRS 'Exhilarating' DANYA KUKAFKA 'Ingenious' LAURA LIPPMAN What if the only way to bury the truth is to bury your husband? The first attempt at killing her husband was the night of the dinner party. After forty years, Thom Graves has become an incredible disappointment to his wife, Wendy - he drinks too much, flirts with other women, and worst of all, is in danger of revealing their dark secret. But how far is Wendy willing to go to stop him? Starting at the end, and ending at the beginning, Kill Your Darlings is an ingenious mystery about two people's life together, and the secrets which fatally bind them. PRAISE FOR PETER SWANSON: 'A killer read with twist after twist.' JANICE HALLETT (on A Talent for Murder ) 'One of the world's best crime writers. Nobody writes psychopaths like Swanson.' MARK EDWARDS 'Delicious . . . I defy you to stop reading once you begin.' New York Times (on The Christmas Guest )

SOON TO BE A MAJOR FILM STARRING JULIA ROBERTS FROM THE SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLING AUTHOR A FINANCIAL TIMES BEST BOOK OF 2025 'A dazzlingly clever murder mystery, told backwards.' GILLIAN McALLISTER 'Deliciously dark.' JOHN MARRS 'Exhilarating' DANYA KUKAFKA 'Ingenious' LAURA LIPPMAN What if the only way to bury the truth is to bury your husband? The first attempt at killing her husband was the night of the dinner party. After forty years, Thom Graves has become an incredible disappointment to his wife, Wendy - he drinks too much, flirts with other women, and worst of all, is in danger of revealing their dark secret. But how far is Wendy willing to go to stop him? Starting at the end, and ending at the beginning, Kill Your Darlings is an ingenious mystery about two people's life together, and the secrets which fatally bind them. PRAISE FOR PETER SWANSON: 'A killer read with twist after twist.' JANICE HALLETT (on A Talent for Murder ) 'One of the world's best crime writers. Nobody writes psychopaths like Swanson.' MARK EDWARDS 'Delicious . . . I defy you to stop reading once you begin.' New York Times (on The Christmas Guest )

"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." --Danya Kukafka, nationally bestselling author of Notes on an Execution From the New York Times bestselling author of The Kind Worth Killing and Eight Perfect Murders comes an inventive, utterly propulsive murder-mystery in reverse, tracing a marriage back in time to uncover the dark secret at its heart. 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.