Rules for Perfect Murders - Peter Swanson - ⭐️⭐️⭐️

** spoiler alert ** “The thing is, and maybe I’m biased by all those years I’ve spent in fictional realms built on deceit, I don’t trust narrators any more than I trust the actual people in my life. We never get the whole truth, not from anybody.”

Having both started and finished this book in a matter of hours, it’s left me with a very odd feeling. This book was certainly intense and perhaps the only word to best describe it would be ‘meta’. A book about books, told by a bookseller. And I can’t deny that it was very clever. Finding ways to bring some reality to the twisted murders of famous crime novels without it coming across as corny or overdone was a great concept that I was excited to see played out.
Yet something about it left me feeling less than satisfied. Any crime fiction fan knows not to trust a narrator and that lesson proves highly useful here. As it turns out, our quiet bookselling narrator has been leading us on in subtle ways throughout the whole novel. But did this really come as a surprise to anyone?
Truthfully, the most emotion I felt during this book was for poor Nero the cat! I couldn’t connect with anyone else and Mal himself felt just a little too distant to grasp on to.
Overall, was Rules For Perfect Murders a clever, fast-paced thriller? Absolutely. Did I enjoy it? Sure, I would say so. But was it lacking? Maybe just a little bit.

- TheHauntedLibrary