Nine Lives by Peter Swanson Review

Nine strangers receive an anonymous letter with nine names on it, including their own. And then they start dying! Coincidence? Not if you’re in a bad novel! But why them - and can Generic FBI Agent Character stop the killer before everyone on the list is moiderized?!

I’d hoped last year’s Every Vow You Break was an unfortunate blip but, after Nine Lives, I think Peter Swanson is just a hack writer. This novel is hot trash.

To be fair, it’s a fine premise and, in the hands of a talented storyteller, potentially great. The way Swanson writes it though is so dull. Each chapter features a different character, all of whom are written in such a flat, unmemorable way that it takes a while to remember who they are. Not that it matters either because they’re all just treading water until they get picked off.

And that’s most of the book too: reading about their boring lives. One of them is having an affair, one of them is… I’m honestly struggling to recall. Oh, I know, one of them’s a bitter wannabe actor, another one’s a small-time singer-songwriter, one of them’s a literary professor (these last two have a doomed romance). Yawn, yawn, yawn.

There’s no tension in the story. The dreary characters putter about their unremarkable lives until they don’t. There are no clues so there’s no way anyone could figure out who the killer is if you wanted to. The reveal of the killer is so underwhelming and the motivation is even more disappointing.

Swanson keeps referencing Agatha Christie’s And Then There Were None, which this novel bears only the loosest, most feebly derivative of similarities to, but Nine Lives suffers for the comparison. And Then There Were None is a masterpiece of mystery crime writing and Nine Lives is nowhere close to that level of greatness.

Rules for Perfect Murders was an ok book but everything else I’ve tried by Peter Swanson has been a dud. I abandoned All the Beautiful Lies and, after Every Vow You Break and now Nine Lives? Nah. No more, that’s it. This writer’s not for me. Nine Lives has a great idea for what could have been a fun novel but turned out to be the dumbest, most unsatisfying examples of disposable airport reads - don’t bother with this instantly forgettable rubbish.