Ira Levin was barely out of college when he wrote A Kiss Before Dying, and it remains one of the most ingeniously constructed thrillers of its era. Its subject is a handsome, intelligent, utterly amoral young man who has decided that the surest route out of a working-class life is to marry one of the three daughters of Leo Kingship, a domineering copper magnate.
The novel unfolds in three movements, each centered on one of the Kingship sisters, and Levin plays a daring structural game with the reader's knowledge of who the killer is and what he intends. Dorothy, the youngest, is the first to fall under his spell; her sister Ellen refuses to accept the official story of what happens to her; and college radio announcer Gordon Gant is drawn into an investigation that closes slowly around a man who always seems to be someone new.
Winner of the 1954 Edgar Award for Best First Novel and twice filmed, A Kiss Before Dying established the cool, clockwork suspense that Levin would later bring to Rosemary's Baby and The Boys from Brazil.