A Talent for Murder

In a word, Swanson’s latest novel can be summarised as ‘extraordinary’. And akin to his previous works, A Talent for Murder is a love letter to readers of literary crime fiction, for there are affectionate nods and winks toward the conventions of the genre.

Swanson’s talent of weaving such engaging tales lies at his ability of taking a crime fiction cliché or a convention and turning it on its head; making you question the darkness [or horror] of human nature as well as its entwined beauty.

Martha Ratcliff is a middle-aged mild mannered librarian; a wall-flower married to an equally unimpressive salesman - Alan Peralta. After viewing him [covertly] from her bedroom window on his return from one of his road-trips, she begins to suspect that maybe her husband is serial killer.

This suspicion becomes an existential crisis for the librarian as a spider-web of thoughts spin in her mind. Swanson forces the reader to contemplate if we ever can truly know [or understand] someone?

Martha contacts her college friend the irascible Lily Kitner to help uncover the truth about her husband. Lily had aided her during her schooling when she previously had ‘issues’. Kitner, bored and living at home with her elderly parents decides to help her old friend. She brings Private Investigator Henry Kimball to assist and so this dark adventure starts to unravel as Kitner and Kimball uncover what lies beneath the veneer of normal lives and a trail of dead bodies.

Told in a beguiling style, alternating between third person as well as first person point of views, we get a literary thriller that will make you shiver next time you think about reading a collection of short stories of John Cheever.

Though a warning – this novel is beguiling because under the cheerfully evocative and engaging narrative, lurks a much darker truth about concealed psychopaths and how banal evil can be.

I’d mark 4^th of July in your diary ‘The Talented Mr Swanson’ with a blood-red Sharpie pen for to miss this novel would be criminal.