Before She Knew Him by Peter Swanson

A special thank you to Edelweiss and William Morrow for an ARC in exchange for an honest review.

Hen (short for Henrietta) and her husband Lloyd have settled into a quiet life in a new neighbourhood just outside of Boston, Massachusetts.  Hen is an illustrator that works out of a studio close to her new home and she is finally feeling a sense of peace and stability after finding the right medication to control her psychotic episodes.

At a block party, Hen and Lloyd are relieved to meet the only other childless couple, Mira and Matthew Dolamore.  It turns out they live next door in a matching Dutch Colonial.  The Dolamores extend a dinner invitation and while on a tour of their home, the sense of peace that Hen feels starts to dissipate after she recognizes a trophy in Matthew's office that went missing from the home of a young man that was killed two years prior.  Hen knows this because she has a secret obsession with this unsolved murder.

Is Matthew a killer?  Or is this just another one of Hen's psychotic episodes?

The more she watches Matthew, the more she not only suspects him, but that he is planning something terrifying that she may not survive.

I read All the Beautiful Lies as an early reviewer and was impressed at Swanson's character development—he has a gift for writing characters that boarder on being psychotic, yet believable.  Each of these characters are flawed, yet it is these flaws that help drive the narrative.  Hen is the perfect unreliable narrator and given her history, nobody believes her, even when she figures things out.

There is a cleverness and preciseness with just enough plot twists to not be predicable or confusing.  If you like psychological thrillers, I encourage you to pick up this book, Swanson is at the top of his game.

PETER SWANSON'S debut novel, The Girl With a Clock for a Heart (2014), was nominated for the LA Times book award. His second novel The Kind Worth Killing (2015), a Richard and Judy pick, was shortlisted for the Ian Fleming Steel Dagger and named the iBooks Store's Thriller of the Year, and was followed by two more critical and commercial hits, Her Every Fear (2017) and All the Beautiful Lies (2018).

He lives with his wife and cat in Somerville, Massachusetts.