Nine Lives by Peter Swanson

Description from Goodreads:

"If you're on the list you're marked for death.

The envelope is unremarkable. There is no return address. It contains a single, folded, sheet of white paper.

The envelope drops through the mail slot like any other piece of post. But for the nine complete strangers who receive it - each of them recognising just one name, their own, on the enclosed list - it will be the most life altering letter they ever receive. It could also be the last, as one by one, they start to meet their end.

But why?

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An intriguing setup with an homage to Agatha Christie that loses steam

I’ve had this one sitting on my dusty to-be-read shelf for ages, so I was really glad to finally get round to reading it. Nine strangers across America receive a plain sheet of paper in the post with nothing on it except a list of nine names. None of them seem to have anything in common, and no one knows who sent it. But as the people on the list start dying in mysterious circumstances, it becomes a race against time for the survivors and the FBI to figure out what connects them before the killer strikes again. It is a locked room style premise based on Agatha Christie’s And Then There Were None, so I was genuinely looking forward to diving into it.

The opening chapters set up the mystery really well. Watching the news unfold and seeing the panic set in across the different characters built up a lot of initial tension. Peter Swanson’s writing style is very readable and the short, fast-paced chapters kept me turning pages early on.

However, as the story progressed, it started to stumble for me. Switching between nine different point-of-view characters meant I never really got to know or care about any of them. Whenever a character died, it lacked any real emotional weight because we had barely spent any pages with them. As the body count mounted, the plot began to feel quite repetitive. The big reveal of the killer and their motive felt a bit rushed and underwhelming compared to the cleverness of the initial setup.

Overall, it is a decent, light thriller that makes for a quick read, but it did not quite live up to its full potential for me.

Thank you to the author, publisher, and NetGalley for enabling me to read and share my honest thoughts.

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