Eight Perfect Murders

First of all, this novel should come with a red tape screaming Spoiler Alert!. I would expect from a devoted mystery reader to not ignore the one glaring rule: dont spoil the ending for other readers. But this novel does. It violates the rule in a careless way without any hint of apology. 8 good plots are spoiled in the first few chapters of the novel, in addition to others throughout the book.

But you know what? I was willing to go with it because it is Peter Swanson. The master who gave us The Kind Worth Killing, Her Every Fear and Before She Knew Him. The problem with this book is that it doesnt resemble the work we come to expect from Swanson. At all.

The writing is stale. The plot lines are disintegrated. You dont enjoy the stoicism of the main character as you do with his previous novels. The main character actually TALKS about his stoicism repeatedly.

Too much repetition. Too much shallow details that lead to nowhere. No surprises. Just some shadows of Swansons signature style here and there. Disappointed beyond words.

I only hope that he needed to get this fascination with those novels out of his system, I read Strangers on a Train based on his recommendation in a previous interview, so maybe this half- baked idea was nagging him to get it in a novel and now its done, and we can move forward. Still, the fact that this book appears to be the first in a series is seriously worrying. I hated, hated, the blandness of Malcolm Kershaw.

After completing this book I was disappointed to say the least. Can’t say I found anything that I enjoyed other than introducing a couple of old mystery titles I have not read.

I don’t like to leave a crappy review without explaining why but I also don’t like to provide spoilers. So it’s hard to say why I didn’t like this book. Ultimately the author didn’t make me believe and didn’t surprise me. Every “twist” was either foretold or just wasn’t captivating. And the bit with his partners wife being interested in him – why? Why bother with that at all, it served no relevance to the story and moved nothing forward.

Go reread your favorite mystery and skip this one. You’ll be much happier.

I am in 100% agreement with all of the negative reviews. I absolutely will not recommend this book to any mystery fan. Especially it should not be read by any fans of classic mysteries and those who may not have read any or all of the eight books mentioned in the blog post that makes up the books title. What little plot exists is totally derivative or “borrowed.” This book consists of more than 50% homage and bad homage at that because brace yourself Swanson reveals the endings of not only the eight books alluded to in the title but a couple of other classic mysteries as well! Swanson has completely ruined a future reading experience for anyone who may be unfamiliar with those titles. It was not necessary to explain the entire plot of every book, it was quite easy to discuss the murder method without revealing who the killer was. VERY EASY! Not only does he spoil them once he does so repeatedly. I got the feeling I was reading a old time serial there was so much repetition. The only thing missing was “Previously on…” or “In our last episode…” He tells us the plot of Malice Aforethought about three separate times. He mentions the ending of The Drowner just as many. [Where are the editors, BTW? Asleep at the wheel as usual. This is my eternal woeful complaint about contemporary publishing houses for the past 20 + years.] That he chose not to be circumspect in discussing the various killers’ IDs makes me think that the writer supposedly paying homage to works of the past is contemptuous of, or at least envious of, those writers and their capacity for ingenuity and originality. Who at HarperCollins or William Morrow thought it a cool idea to giveaway the endings of all these books? Ugh. I was beyond disappointed with Swanson, I was furious with him.

What about Swanson’s own imagination? Extremely limited from what is on display here. Since so much of the book is based on the works of more skilled and much more interesting and imaginative writers Swanson had to surpass all of them in my estimation in order to succeed. He failed. His ideas are pedestrian or derivative of movies and TV shows. The overarching plot and the slow reveal of Malcolms true personality is a retread of every damn “unreliable narrator” book published in the past ten years. He even alludes to Gone Girl as a “clue” that Malcolm is just as unreliable as the narrator in that book. And makes it seem like Gillian Flynn invented the concept. I was rolling my eyes. Nothing was surprising at all. The movie-of-the-week style motivations of the protagonist and the horrible secrets of the victims who deserved to die was neither creepy nor spinechilling. It was just banal.

Finally the biggest insult of all. In Malcolm Kershaw he has created a bookseller who doesn’t read the books he sells, who pretends to have read them when having conversations with his customers and employees. Swanson gives an entirely lame reason for Malcolms decision to stop reading crime fiction that is in conflict with his personality. Most likely this is meant as an indication that Malcolm is not to be trusted at all. But not only did I not trust him, I thoroughly despised him.

I was drawn in by the clever premise. However, the story did not deliver.
The writing was disjointed at points and a little clunky. The ‘surprise ending’ was obvious from the first chapter. There were several useless characters who merely showed up to deliver a few lines then went nowhere. Similarly, there were plotlines, such as The middle school teacher, that were obviously meant to advance The plot, but ended up reading like a few short stories. The writing moved along smoothly at points, but overall it dragged. None of the characters appealed to me enough to create the tension necessary for a thriller, they were flat.

Contrived, cliched, convoluted and nonsensical. Ultimately, this just didn’t make a lot of sense, particularly the ending. I believe the author was trying to accomplish something along the Agatha Christie’s The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, but fails miserably. The murderer could have so easily gotten away with it, but decided, for no understandable reason, to not do so.