Nine Lives - Peter Swanson

Mystery

Rating: 4/10

Well, you can’t win them all.

Eight books in, this author finally misses the mark on what has previously been very solid performance.  Typically, each book has earned between seven and eight out of ten, with my favourite of his, Eight Perfect Murders, only a smidge away from rating as a near perfect read.   Which as you may or may not know, I do not hand out with anything resembling reckless abandon.

Continuing to shape his narratives as homages to classic mystery writers, in this case Agatha Christie, instead of leaving the threads of correlation for the reader to parse together, everything is rather obvious. Excruciatingly so.  The result being something that feels like more of a contrivance than a compliment.

Nine strangers get a list in the mail with their names and the names of eight others on it.  When they start turning up dead, the police believe there must be something that connects them. If you’ve applied your deductive skills to figure out which of Christies books this is meant to pay tribute to, you can guess where this is going.

At the risk of spoiling anything, which in this rare instance I am willing to embrace, as the list grows short on living people so too will the interest the reader has in whodunnit and why.

I read so much effusive and sycophantic praise for this book it almost made me want to be mean(er) in my review.  But given how much pleasure Peter Swanson has bestowed on my reading life I will just leave it here.

Book Pairing(s): Eight Perfect Murders by Peter Swanson, The Kind Worth Killing by Peter Swanson, Her Every Fear by Peter Swanson