These are all domestic thrillers that had various tactics in exploring the age-old theme (well…since “Gone Girl” scored Harry Potter level sales anyway) of relationships gone bad. I’ll admit that some strategies work better than others.
The Hand That Feeds You by A.J. Rich…Whereas “The Daylight Marriage” went for realism and “The Kind Worth Killing” for classic noir double-crosses, this book mostly struggles to decide what it wants to be or even why it wants to be. It’s about a woman who discovers her fiancee killed by his own dogs, only to then discover that her fiancee had multiple other women he was engaged to and they start dying one by one. It’s a mean, nasty book that honestly feels both too much—the authors have said they based the dead con-man off of someone they knew and they might take a little too much delight in his punishment—and too little: long passages are just the lead character listing psychological descriptions that feel copy-and-pasted because the authors couldn’t find a way to fill out their underwritten narrative. By the end, I felt like I’d just spent time on something toxic that had no point with people I really didn’t care to be around much longer, a lot like how the lead character feels about her con-job relationship. Grade: D+
The Daylight Marriage by Heidi Pitlor…By far, the most realistic “missing woman” book of the dozens that have been released in the last few years, and that makes it–in a way–all the scarier. Pitlor’s book doesn’t revolve around plot twists or gamesmanship at all, so much as the quieter moments of what it’s characters are really yearning for but can’t quite reach. When the missing woman’s fate is revealed, you’ve probably guessed it chapters earlier in this slender, speedy book (you can read the whole thing in a day) and it’s more about the sadness that won’t end even after the plot does. That may not be as fun as stylish, cold-blooded backstabbers, but “Daylight Marriage” is a book that wants to stab you in the front. At times, the book is a little too hung-up on the weepiness of it all, but knowing who ultimately undoes the woman in “Daylight” might just save your own life one day. Grade: B+
The Kind Worth Killing by Peter Swanson…The most “fun” of these books by a mile, “The Kind Worth Killing” has as much in common with the classic noirs of Patricia Highsmith than it does with the more emotional, introspective millennial domestic thrillers. [Think more “Strangers on a Train” than “Girl on a Train.”] And I, for one, think that’s a great thing. It basically takes four connivers—a very bad marriage and their respective lovers and/or co-conspirators—and plots them against one another through a chance encounter on an airplane. The central character/killer of Lily is at once terrifying and appealing, an attractive femme fatale Hollywood actresses would love to play in film adaptation. Grade: B+/A-