Nine Lives

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If you carefully follow the narrative from the very beginning, you'll notice some not-so-subtle hints that are very revealing, even before the first murder takes place. Peter Swanson has become a must-read author for me when it comes to crime fiction and I love that his books are so thrilling and binge-worthy and this latest one is no exception – I read this one in a day! Ebooks fulfilled through Glose cannot be printed, downloaded as PDF, or read in other digital readers (like Kindle or Nook). Home to William Golding, Sylvia Plath, Kazuo Ishiguro, Sally Rooney, Tsitsi Dangarembga, Max Porter, Ingrid Persaud, Anna Burns and Rachel Cusk, among many others, Faber is proud to publish some of the greatest novelists from the early twentieth century to today.

The narrative follows the potential victims and gives us a glimpse into their lives and how knowing they are on a killer's target list impacts them. It’s about nine people who each receive an unremarkable envelope in the post containing a piece of paper bearing nine names, one of which is theirs.

Thank you to William Morrow and Scene of the Crime for a widget of the ARC through NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

I will say that the “big reveal” at the end wasn’t all that thrilling, it was sort of easy to put together once the information was presented. Before I began reading my Kindle version of Nine Lives, I took a picture of the cast list, with descriptions of the nine people on a very special list. I have read And Then There Were None, but of course can’t remember what happened except that it was a book about a group of people killed one at a time. While most of the characters were likable and didn’t deserve their fate, we wouldn’t have a story without a killer and victims so it’s not quite the light fare I’m describing. it's pretty clichéd to punish ████████████ by ████, but it's even worse because most of the victims were ████████████ so who's being ████ here?I appreciate how the author keeps trying to do new things, experimenting with new concepts and styles, as it makes opening each of his books a bit of a mystery in itself, but a number of things didn't work for me in this one. I loved this, Swanson's sharp and insightful characterization brought to life a fascinating premise, beautifully worked out. Ultimately the construction of the mystery is sound and it has very solid working parts, but the actual foundation of the motive was pretty generic and glossed over. However, I don’t know if it was just me, but I very quickly got confused with so many different POV’s.

The Kind Worth Killing’ was incredible and I keep giving Swanson chances looking for that gold mine again. But my main issue with the characters is that because there was so many, I didn’t end up connecting with all of them.

But where Christie made clear that her characters had all committed crimes and the killer was out for revenge, the motives and location of Swanson’s killer are terrifyingly opaque. Peter Swanson has an uncanny knack of writing very readable, absorbing and clever crime books, and Nine Lives, his latest is no different.