I recently read, and really loved, Peter Swanson's second novel, The Kind Worth Killing. You have to wait for the review till Shiny 5 comes out on 7 April, but my enthusiasm for it was so great that I got hold of this one, his debut, and plunged in straight away.
The Kind Worth Killing is told in chapters narrated by several different alternating narrators, and this one uses a similar device, except that this time we are constantly moving between two timeframes, the present day and a past about twenty years earlier. The main protagonist is George Foss, who is now the manager of a small Boston literary magazine. When George was eighteen and in his first year at a small New England college, he had fallen deeply in love with his first ever girlfriend. Imagine his desperation, then, when in the Christmas vacation he had heard that Audrey had committed suicide. Unable to settle to anything, he had rushed off to her Florida home, only to discover that the girl who killed herself was not the girl he knew as Audrey. Gradually the truth behind this bizarre deception had started to emerge, and he had discovered that 'his' Audrey was in fact Liana Decter, a girl from a highly dysfunctional background. But then Liana had disappeared.
Back in the present, it's not too much of an exaggeration to say that George has never really got over Liana. He's still unmarried, and though he has a delightful on-off girlfriend he's unable to commit to her. He just can't stop thinking about Liana, and has spent the past twenty years thinking, mistakenly, that he's spotted her in a bar or a café. One day, he actually does. But, though initially thrilled to be reunited with her, he soon discovers that she's using him in a big way. She tells him she's in trouble, and asks him to deliver a large wad of banknotes to someone she stole them from. Most people would say no, but poor besotted George agrees, and soon things turn from bad to worse to much much worse. There are violent hit men, tranquilliser darts, dead bodies and kidnappings galore in store for George, but despite it all he can't seem to break himself of his addiction to a woman who he knows very well is astonishingly bad news:
It was a gift, a specialty, a talent. She could become someone else, and she could then just as easily kill what she became, taking out whoever happened to be in the way. And if transformation was her special talent, then George knew what had attracted Liana to him was that he was someone who would never transform. He would always be the same.
'He would always be the same' -- this is really the clue to George, I suppose. He isn't anyone special, just an ordinary, slightly depressed sort of bloke getting on with his life as best he can. Liana, on the other hand, is a crook of the first order. Completely lacking in morals, she blithely dashes through life, making use of anyone who happens to come in handy, and disposing of them when they have outlived their usefulness. The book's rather curious title is the way George describes Liana to himself towards the end, though I couldn't quite see what it meant apart from the obvious fact that she's completely heartless.
There's a lot of fun to be had in this novel, and excitement of a decidedly noir-ish kind. I think I've read somewhere that it's going to be made into a film, though who knows how that will turn out. I shall certainly be looking out for Peter Swanson's next novel.
