Nine Lives

Product Information

She along with her team locate and provide protection to the remaining names on the list which, let me tell you proves to be a long-winded affair.

It's a nod to And Then There Were None, arguably Agatha Christie's most well-known and beloved mystery. There is such a large number of characters in this book that I felt the different perspectives helped to add a much needed depth. The Kind Worth Killing’ was incredible and I keep giving Swanson chances looking for that gold mine again. I also didn’t really agree with the reason behind all of it, it made sense in the way that it was explained, but it didn’t make sense to me overall why a person would do that.

Not my favorite Swanson, but a solid read that kept me speculating and I appreciated that it stayed coherent from beginning to end.

An entertaining read, but as the characters were being killed off, I wanted more clues, more bread crumbs, a trail to follow. Since 2011, I have been guiding avid readers toward books they will love and offering a friendly place to discuss them. at the very beginning of the book the author gives us a list of all the main characters (thank goodness)! He caught a connection between the lists and Christie’s classic novel, and read it several times while the investigation was ongoing. This can’t be dismissed as a prank, or as a computer glitch that just tossed nine names out, because one of the men on the list is drowned on the beach in Maine with the list still clutched in his hand.However, when one of the names meets an untimely death, Jessica realises that the bad feeling she had, has been confirmed. As each stranger on the list of names is slowly picked off one by one, the deaths are done in ways that are almost always matter of fact, totally believable, and in a finite and quick manner that makes the beat punch hard, but then go onto the next. FBI agent Jessica Winslow also receives the list and learns from a colleague that someone on the list got murdered. I was pleased by the way things came together and the twist toward the end that I probably should have seen coming, but didn't. The author can always be relied on to come up with the kind of crime fiction that will garner a huge audience, and I have no doubt that this will be a big success on publication.

There is a list of characters complete with a brief bio of each at the beginning of the book, and I bookmarked this for quick reference, although I hardly used it.Nine random people receive a sheet of paper - a list with just nine names on it - nothing else, no clue as to what the list signifies. And found myself referring back to them until the characters developed more and I could keep them all straight. It seemed like such a lame reason for everything, so I couldn't even say I suffered through it for a "wow" ending. Pro-tip: The first two pages gave a brief description of the cast of characters…which indicated to me that I needed to take notes. The mystery itself is intriguing, and Swanson does a fantastic job balancing multiple POVs and keeping the reader hooked from one short chapter to the next.