While she doesn’t see the name Dustin Miller on the trophy, she’s sure it belonged to the young man who was murdered in his apartment two years ago.

Matthew notices her reaction but nonchalantly explains he doesn’t fence, he just liked the trophy when he found it in a shop. Hen spots a familiar-looking fencing trophy in Matthew’s study that obviously shakes her. The evening turns out to be pleasantly relaxed and Hen is almost enjoying herself …until Mira gives them a tour of their home. When Hen and Lloyd are invited to Mira and Matthew’s, their new neighbors, house for dinner one weekend, Hen can’t figure out a way to politely decline.

Hen is finally feeling content: she’s lived with bipolar disorder for years but feels she is on the right track now that she has the right medication and she has found success as a children’s book illustrator. Henrietta (Hen) and her husband Lloyd have recently moved in to a new home in a quiet neighborhood. With the holidays and other miscellaneous adulting out of the way, I settled down with this book and was not disappointed! I had a feeling this would be another book I’d attempt to read in one sitting (in reality it was two) so I’ve been saving it for the perfect lazy weekend. So when I noticed Swanson has an upcoming release, I had to request a copy on Edelweiss! I was ready to beg, but luckily William Morrow didn’t make me do that. Compulsively readable with not one but two insanely entertaining twists, Swanson single-handedly redeemed the psychological thriller genre for me (that sounds dramatic, but it’s true) with that book because I was burned out on the same plot twists and the over-used blurb “the next Girl on the Train“. ( From the publisher and the author's website.The first book my book club read in 2018 was The Kind Worth Killing by Peter Swanson and I was floored! I. He lives with his wife and cat in Somerville, Massachusetts. Swanson has degrees in creative writing, education, and literature from Trinity College, the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, and Emerson College. He has won awards in poetry from The Lyric and Yankee Magazine, and is currently completing a sonnet sequence on all 53 of Alfred Hitchcock’s films. Swanson's poems, stories and reviews have appeared in such journals as The Atlantic, Asimov’s Science Fiction, Epoch, Measure, Notre Dame Review, Soundings East, and The Vocabula Review.

Eight Perfect Murders (2020) is his most recent. Peter Swanson is the author of several novels: The Girl with a Clock for a Heart (2014) The Kind Worth Killing (2015), Her Every Fear (2016), and Before She Knew Him (2019).

Currently-lives in Somerville, Massachusetts.

Education-B.A., Trinity College M.A., University of Massachusetts-Amherst M.F.A., Emerson College.

Before she knew him book summary