Rules For Perfect Murders by Peter Swanson

 

Someone is killing people following a list of perfect murders on a blog post. The FBI approaches the post's author, Malcolm Kershaw, to find out if he has any idea who might be following his carefully curated list.

Rules For Perfect Murders by Peter Swanson was my book group read for September, and my first time reading this author. I found the writing style easy to follow and was immediately hooked by what was happening. Stories featuring books always appeal.

Malcolm Kershaw runs a bookshop in Boston, Massachusetts. He leads a solitary existence. When not working in the shop, he's holed up in his apartment, still coming to terms with the death of his wife. He loves reading, particularly crime novels, but recently his joy of reading seems to have deserted him. Having read thrillers since he was a child, he's got extensive knowledge of the genre, with a particular focus on classic crime. When he became part-owner of the shop, he started a blog, and one of the early posts was about eight perfect murders in crime fiction. Malcolm is shocked when an FBI agent contacts him to say that someone seems to be killing people using the methods outlined in his long-forgotten blog post.

This is very much a homage to crime fiction over the past hundred years. From the outset, there is a slight air of mystery surrounding Malcolm, the heartbroken widower. Malcolm is a classic unreliable narrator; the descriptions of the other characters leave you constantly questioning who can be trusted. I even began to consider Malcolm suffering from dissociative identity disorder. All the twists and turns kept me gripped, and each new reveal was shocking and unexpected. The level of uncertainty you feel continues right through to the conclusion, and even then, there is a lingering sense of doubt that this is really the end.

As a slight aside, Malcolm talks about books being a form of time travel. As readers, we are used to books allowing us to escape the present and become engrossed in the time period in which they are set. One point raised by Malcolm that I'd never considered before is that books also take us back to different versions of ourselves, to times when we read certain books. I vividly remember my childhood reading.

Author Details

Peter Swanson’s novels include The Girl With a Clock for a Heart, nominated for an LA Times book award, The Kind Worth Killing, a Richard and Judy pick and the iBooks store’s thriller of the year in 2015, and, most recently, Before She Knew Him. He lives with his wife and cat on the north shore of Massachusetts.