‘A Talent for Murder’ by Peter Swanson

Published by Faber,
4 July 2024.
ISBN: 978-0-571-37361-1 (HB)

Alan has always been kind, considerate, gentle, a model husband in fact. His job means he travels a lot, mainly to teachers’ conferences where he sells novelty items to the participants, and his wife Martha has never had cause to wonder what he gets up to while he’s away. But then a young woman commits suicide at one of the conferences, and Martha sees a strange expression on Alan’s face when he returns. Suddenly she’s uneasy and turns to an old friend for support.

Lily is surprised to hear from Martha; they lost touch after college, although they have good cause to remember each other. Lily rescued Martha from a relationship which threatened to destroy her – and now another relationship seems about to deliver the same fate. They begin to look at the conferences Alan has been attending and discover something alarming: a young woman has died in suspicious circumstances at more of the venues than can be explained by simple coincidence.

Martha works full-time, but Lily is between jobs; she decides to attend the next conference herself and find out what Alan’s real agenda is. And that’s when things start to turn very dark, and very complicated.

One of Peter Swanson’s strengths is the evocation of the real America of small towns where the story unfolds. This is neither the wild open spaces of the only partly tamed west, nor the frenetic, traffic-laden streets of the big cities; this is the America where ordinary people live. What’s more, he turns those ordinary people into memorable ones. Martha is someone you’d pass in the street and barely notice her; she’s a librarian, softly spoken and unremarkable, but after a few chapters I felt I knew her. Likewise mild-mannered Alan, who does indeed have a secret life; is it the one Martha suspects? Lily is more sharp-edged and worldly, though not quite streetwise enough to stay completely out of reach of danger. She lives with her parents, more for their benefit than her own, or so she tells herself. They’re a little quirky, wrapped up in themselves.

And then there’s Ethan, handsome enough to stop traffic and charming as well. Where does he come into the picture?

Between Martha’s research skills and Lily’s perception, the truth eventually emerges – but it leaves a trail of bodies in its wake and a few surprises along the way. It’s more a gradual unfolding of events than edge-of-the-seat thriller, beautifully written and well-paced. You won’t want to stop reading until justice prevails: the cosmic kind, which is often more satisfying than a legal solution.
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 Reviewer: Lynne Patrick

Peter Swanson is the author of two novels, The Girl with a Clock for a Heart, and The Kind Worth Killing, available from William Morrow in the United States and Faber & Faber in the United Kingdom. His poems, stories and reviews have appeared in such journals as The Atlantic, Asimov’s Science Fiction, Epoch, Measure, Notre Dame Review, Soundings East, and The Vocabula Review. He has won awards in poetry from The Lyric and Yankee Magazine, and is currently completing a sonnet sequence on all 53 of Alfred Hitchcock’s films. He lives with his wife and cat in Somerville, Massachusetts. 

http://www.peter-swanson.com 

Lynne Patrick has been a writer ever since she could pick up a pen, and has enjoyed success with short stories, reviews and feature journalism, but never, alas, with a novel. She crossed to the dark side to become a publisher for a few years and is proud to have launched several careers which are now burgeoning. She lives in Oxfordshire in a house groaning with books, about half of them crime fiction.