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3.66 AVERAGE
3.66 AVERAGE
This was book two, but can also be read as a standalone. I enjoyed it a lot. A lot of twists and turns / cat and mouse style!
Great second book in this series. I absolutely love Lily and glad she made an appearance in this book too.
3.5/5
The Kind Worth Killing is one of my favorite thrillers of the last 10 years. I loved rooting for the antihero in Lily Kinter and the complexity in Henry Kimball. None of us are all one thing, and nobody better exemplifies it than these two.
It was great to have them brought back together and see the fruits of their strange friendship come to pass. I love the idea of Lily as a Dexter-like character but one with much more heart and compassion and depth. Really makes you think.
I liked this less than the original, but it was still a great read. Even my least favorite of Swanson’s books is still a better book than most.
The Kind Worth Killing is one of my favorite thrillers of the last 10 years. I loved rooting for the antihero in Lily Kinter and the complexity in Henry Kimball. None of us are all one thing, and nobody better exemplifies it than these two.
It was great to have them brought back together and see the fruits of their strange friendship come to pass. I love the idea of Lily as a Dexter-like character but one with much more heart and compassion and depth. Really makes you think.
I liked this less than the original, but it was still a great read. Even my least favorite of Swanson’s books is still a better book than most.
mysterious
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
A mix
Strong character development:
Complicated
Loveable characters:
Complicated
As a follow up to the first book, it was fine. I prefer the first book (The Kind Worth Killkng) because the thrills and plot twists were more enthralling. This story was more predictable, but I was still curious as to how it would end. Curious what a third book would look like.
In this second book in the Henry Kimball/Lily Kintner series, Henry and Lily have struck up a close, if unusual friendship. It is Lily that Henry turns to when he is perplexed by one of his cases - an ex-student from his year as a high school teacher has hired him to prove her husband is having an affair; Henry subsequently finds the two of them dead in what is apparently a murder-cum-suicide. It seems like an open and shut case but nothing is ever quite open and shut with Henry and Lily. The book alternates between the present where Henry is investigating what happened to Joan Grieve's husband Richard, and the past, when Henry was Joan's high school English teacher and a student in the class was shot by another student.
The Sequel Worth Skipping. If you can suspend a good amount of belief, you’ll like this, but if you’re like me (sorry), this was pretty dumb. And I have a rule about books with pointless fictional school shootings. It’s absolutely tasteless, especially in this ridiculous context. There’s no space for that shit in my reading life. I’ll never read Swanson again. #thankunext
dark
tense
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
A mix
Strong character development:
Complicated
Loveable characters:
Complicated
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
"It sounded ludicrous, I realized." — Chapter 26, aka how I feel about this book.
The Kind Worth Killing remains my favorite Peter Swanson novel so you can imagine how stoked I was about a sequel! Sad to say The Kind Worth Saving didn't quite hit the same...
The author also tried to follow the same template where a main characters gets killed very early into the book vis-à-vis Dream Barrymore in Scream but hey, guess what. It's no longer shocking when you do it a second or third time!
The characters arcs of Joan and Richard Seddon were terribly inconsistent, going from sociopathic to cold and calculated to fumbling fools who make careless mistakes. I would have loved a girlboss read where Lily and Joan try to one-up each other but noooo.
So while entertaining, this was a disappointment for me overall.
2.5⭐ rounded up because solid last scene. I loved that final conversation.
Note: Yes, you should read the first book before this as it contains multiple references to the events of The Kind Worth Killing and major spoilers.
Thank you William Morrow for the gifted hardcover and Netgalley ARC.
Favourite quotes:
✨ "Some people fall in love because they are excellent observers and they can see what is in front of them. And some people fall in love because they only imagine what is in front of them. They construct something that isn't there."
✨ "I think that romantic love, not family love, is the most destructive force on earth. It's the only thing that makes otherwise good people hurt one another."
✨ "I'm not talking about what people will do for love. I'm talking about what people do to the ones they love. They break each other's hearts."
✨ "And even with the happiest couples, one of them will die first at the end. We all eventually wind up in a tragedy."
✨ "I actually think it's greedy that humans expect the ones they love to love them back. They don't expect it from books, or from movies, or from nature. Why do we expect it of people? Maybe my love is better because you don't love me in return?"
The Kind Worth Killing remains my favorite Peter Swanson novel so you can imagine how stoked I was about a sequel! Sad to say The Kind Worth Saving didn't quite hit the same...
Spoiler
It was a page-turner for sure but the quality of the plot declines around the halfway mark. And while I loved the return of familiar characters (especially Lily), this just felt like an unnecessary sequel and a total cop-out. Like come on, you call that a twist? Two Richards, really?The author also tried to follow the same template where a main characters gets killed very early into the book vis-à-vis Dream Barrymore in Scream but hey, guess what. It's no longer shocking when you do it a second or third time!
The characters arcs of Joan and Richard Seddon were terribly inconsistent, going from sociopathic to cold and calculated to fumbling fools who make careless mistakes. I would have loved a girlboss read where Lily and Joan try to one-up each other but noooo.
So while entertaining, this was a disappointment for me overall.
2.5⭐ rounded up because solid last scene. I loved that final conversation.
Note: Yes, you should read the first book before this as it contains multiple references to the events of The Kind Worth Killing and major spoilers.
Thank you William Morrow for the gifted hardcover and Netgalley ARC.
Favourite quotes:
✨ "Some people fall in love because they are excellent observers and they can see what is in front of them. And some people fall in love because they only imagine what is in front of them. They construct something that isn't there."
✨ "I think that romantic love, not family love, is the most destructive force on earth. It's the only thing that makes otherwise good people hurt one another."
✨ "I'm not talking about what people will do for love. I'm talking about what people do to the ones they love. They break each other's hearts."
✨ "And even with the happiest couples, one of them will die first at the end. We all eventually wind up in a tragedy."
✨ "I actually think it's greedy that humans expect the ones they love to love them back. They don't expect it from books, or from movies, or from nature. Why do we expect it of people? Maybe my love is better because you don't love me in return?"
I loved The Kind Worth Killing -- Swanson's 2015 thriller was twisty, inventive, surprising, and such a satisfying read. I've recommended it to enough readers who "just want a good read," that Swanson should be paying me royalties.
This is not a worthy "sequel." It's predictable, poorly written...and just dull. It's not really even a sequel. Sure, Henry Kimball and Lily Kintner are back -- but whereas Lily is one of the more devious, delightful anti-heroes in the first book, in this one she's basically just window dressing. And Henry is just a sad-sack private detective living in a crappy apartment with a cat writing terrible limericks and trying to solve an obvious "mystery."
There's not even really a mystery here. We know everything that's about to happen. There are no surprises, no twists. Swanson is constantly clumsy about how information is revealed -- we have the dueling narrators again, and we spend so much time rehashing what the reader already knows so the other character can get up to speed.
Skip this. I'd actually given up on Swanson after the several books after The Kind Worth Killing were duds. But I got sucked back in for this "sequel." Bad move. Error in judgment. Won't happen again.
This is not a worthy "sequel." It's predictable, poorly written...and just dull. It's not really even a sequel. Sure, Henry Kimball and Lily Kintner are back -- but whereas Lily is one of the more devious, delightful anti-heroes in the first book, in this one she's basically just window dressing. And Henry is just a sad-sack private detective living in a crappy apartment with a cat writing terrible limericks and trying to solve an obvious "mystery."
There's not even really a mystery here. We know everything that's about to happen. There are no surprises, no twists. Swanson is constantly clumsy about how information is revealed -- we have the dueling narrators again, and we spend so much time rehashing what the reader already knows so the other character can get up to speed.
Skip this. I'd actually given up on Swanson after the several books after The Kind Worth Killing were duds. But I got sucked back in for this "sequel." Bad move. Error in judgment. Won't happen again.