Not every read is going to be the best book you've ever read. I don't know if I'll remember this book a few months from now, but sometimes, some books are just great to read in the moment.

There were tiny clues, and not as many twists and turns as you would expect, and there's a good chance that you might have guessed the villain well before the ending but I still enjoyed it. It seems quite fitting that the plot follows Malcolm Kershaw, a bookstore owner who wrote a blog post about eight perfect murders, in which he picks books that hold what the title suggests, and within those eight books he chooses an Agatha Christie novel - The ABC murders, because this felt like a modern Agatha Christie. Although, I don't feel like this was really a quintessential thriller. However, I will definitely work my way through the rest of Kershaw’s list of eight after reading this book.It seems if I'm picking up a thriller these days, it's slow burn and this one dipped into that sub-genre as well.

Murders and Double Indemnity back in undergrad, when I first started publishing mystery novels. Ironically, I was told to study The A.B.C. Some of the stories on his list of eight I was familiar with prior to this book. The pacing was quick and the use of notable past mystery stories was intriguing. This book was full of unexpected twists and successfully pulled off the unreliable narrator trope. Though this storyline has been similarly done before, Swanson did a wonderful job of making the story his own. Malcolm takes it upon himself to investigate the killings and must face the cold, hard truth that someone in his life just might be the killer. Years later, however, an FBI agent approaches Malcolm at his bookstore about a string of unsolved murders that appear to have come straight from his list. When considering what to write about in his first blog post, book junky and mystery genre expert Malcolm Kershaw decides to make a list of eight literary works that portray perfect murders.

Peter Swanson’s Eight Perfect Murders cleverly pays homage to past mystery stories while begging the question, what is a perfect murder? Undoubtedly, Christie broke barriers in the literary world and invented clever plot twists that had never been done before. And Then There Were None was the first book that got me hooked on suspense, mysteries, and thrillers. Growing up, I was an avid Agatha Christie reader.

Eight perfect murders