On a delayed flight from London to Boston, Ted Severson strikes up a drink-fueled conversation with an elegant stranger named Lily. Loosened by cocktails and a wound he can't stop pressing, Ted admits that his wife is cheating on him — and that, some nights, he thinks he could kill her for it. To his surprise, Lily doesn't flinch. She calmly agrees that some people simply deserve to die, and offers to help him do it.
What starts as an abstract game between two strangers becomes a meticulous plan, and then something far more dangerous. Because Lily is not a bored socialite indulging a fantasy. She has killed before, she has her own reasons for everything she does, and the tidy scheme she and Ted are building has more moving parts — and more hidden players — than either of them will admit.
A modern homage to Patricia Highsmith, Peter Swanson's The Kind Worth Killing is a coiled psychological thriller told through shifting, unreliable points of view. Every chapter recalibrates who is manipulating whom, building toward a game of murder in which trusting the wrong person is the only truly fatal mistake.