The Kind Worth Killing

Revenge has rarely been served colder than in Swanson’s exceptional thriller, his second standalone after 2013’s The Girl with a Clock for a Heart. When Ted Severson, a wealthy Boston entrepreneur, and Lily Kintner, an attractive archivist at Winslow College outside Boston, meet by chance in a Heathrow airport lounge, they trade intimate secrets: Ted wants to kill his unfaithful wife, Miranda—and Lily, who’s about Miranda’s age, wants to help. Unbeknownst to Ted, Lily has made a career of dispassionate homicide, at one point musing, “to take another life was, in many ways, the greatest expression of what it meant to be alive.” While Ted and Lily hatch their devious scheme back in Boston, police detective Henry Kimball tries to untangle the web of deceit that surrounds Lily. With scalpel-sharp prose, Swanson probes the nature of cold-blooded evil. Few will be prepared for the crushing climax. Agent: Nat Sobel, Sobel Weber Associates. (Feb.)