Malcolm Kershaw, a middle-aged widow managing a semi-famous Boston bookshop called Old Devils, discovers that a years-old listicle he wrote for his shop’s blog about eight perfect literary murders has become the inspiration for a serial killer, who is now working their way through the list, enacting each murder out. But is Mal more involved than he thinks - does the killer know him… and could he be a future target…?
Peter Swanson’s Rules For Perfect Murders (published as Eight Perfect Murders in the States - no idea why it got retitled for the UK market as Eight Perfect Murders is a much better title) is a pretty decent thriller. The premise is intriguing and the first half of the book flies by effortlessly, as Mal and FBI Agent Gwen Mulvey investigate the crimes and start joining the dots.
The second half is where the book loses momentum, in part because Mulvey moves out of the picture and it’s clear she was the driving force behind a lot of the plot development. The second half doesn’t have quite the surprises of the first and it’s mostly just Mal puttering about waiting for “Charlie” (the nickname for their blog post killer) to make a move.
I like that Swanson made Mal a protagonist of dubious alignment - that he wasn’t some innocent caught up in something terrible - and the reveals of his involvement added spice to the story. The flashbacks were kept to a minimum and didn’t drag. That said, any plot that requires me to believe someone planned to literally scare someone to death by wearing a spooky mask is going to take me out of the narrative because that’s just too damn silly to take seriously. And, while the killer’s reveal was unpredictable, the ending itself was uninspired and somewhat anticlimactic.
Still, Rules For Perfect Murders takes a kinda daffy concept and develops it into a fun story that’s fairly entertaining - not a bad read!
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