A Wild Weird Ride of a Book

The Kind Worth Killing by Pete Swanson is one wild weird ride of a book! Weird in a good way, as you might say to an author who wrote a book that was full of surprises (including even limericks written by a character), “I like your weird brain very much!” The ending is unexpected, and It looks like Lily’s plea deal is about to get bulldozed along with her favorite meadow which holds some of her deepest secrets, a result of the new property owner’s landscaping project. 

The book opens with Ted Severson and Lily Kintner having a chance encounter in an airport, discovering they’re to be on the same flight which has been delayed, and having a drink in the lounge. He’s attracted to her, “She was beautiful—long red hair, eyes a lucid greenish blue like tropical waters, and skin so pale it was the almost bluish white of skim milk.” They begin a conversation, “‘What are you reading?’ she asked. ‘The newspaper. I don’t really like books.’ ‘So what do you do on flights?’ ‘Drink gin. Plot murders.’ ‘Interesting.’ She smiled at me, the first I’d seen.” Now he’s got her attention. He tells her after seeing his wife kissing the contractor of their beach home, “‘I think if I had a gun on me that I could easily have shot them both through the window.’ ‘So you are thinking of killing her,’ she said, the plane starting its pre-takeoff hum.” Her unconventional response to his murder fantasy is she thinks murder isn’t always bad, and his “wife, for example, seems like the kind worth killing.”

The vibe here is a bit like Patricia Hightower’s most popular book, Strangers on a Train, and that’s reinforced by the fact Lily’s book of choice for the flight is another Hightower book, The Two Faces of January, which she candidly tells Ted is “ “Not one of her best.” Later in the book Lily’s father describes her, “‘ Remember when you were little you used to crawl into the pile of leaves?’ ‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘Other kids always wanted to jump on leaves, apparently, but you used to burrow into them. Stay inside them for hours. You don’t remember that?’ ‘Kind of.’ ‘You were such a strange little girl. Before you got your nose into books we used to think we’d given birth to a wild animal. You barely smiled. You’d creep around outside for hours. You made animal sounds. We used to call you our fox girl, and say that you were being raised by humans.’” That being said, much of the description of her childhood would demonstrate, her parents were human, but not much in the parenting department as they led self absorbed hedonistic lives with barely an afterthought for their daughter. 

The balance of the book concerns Ted and Lily’s contemplation of murdering his wife (Lily has quite a bit of advice for Ted), and how those related events transpired, with some flashbacks to Lily’s past, and the experiences she had that gave her tremendous insights into how murders should be done. In some ways the book was almost a farce about murder, at times a black comedy, embodied by Lily’s philosophy: “Everyone dies. What difference does it make if a few bad apples get pushed along a little sooner than God intended?”