one of the Edar award nominees and, i think, deservedly so. The plot, while a bit of a stretch of the imagination, does service to the theme of the wicked ways of men. Particulalry in academia but also in life in general. ( )

I will read this again one day, as I usually enjoy David Bell's work. For some reason, this one just didn't catch my attention and the foreshadowing made me feel as though I didn't need to bother reading the book since I knew what was going to happen anyway. ( )

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This one hit the way the others of his I've read have hit. As a crime novel, the puzzle was predictable and easy to solve. The characters are very flat, a collection of traits and mannerisms and pat backstories. Some of the characters' actions were pretty illogical (starting with Madeline showing up with blazing red hair at the reading). I usually enjoy mysteries with a university setting (hello, Kate Fansler mysteries!) and enjoy books about book/ms theft (hello, Who Is Maud Dixon), but maybe I've read too many good ones, so this one was dull. Even the awareness of sexual harassment felt like he was checking off boxes on a list of things the book was too be about. I won't be reading any more of the author. ( )

Maybe I would have liked Kill All Your Darlings more if I hadn’t read The Plot first. The central conflict is the same, where a stolen manuscript accidentally reveals too much about an actual crime. I did love how the conflict kicked off, when a local cop who loves reading thrillers in her free time notices that certain details are just too accurate and too familiar. But overall, I found this novel slightly too flat to feel like a thriller and without enough nuance to feel like a lit novel with suspense elements.

In the pressure of publish-or-perish, Connor’s stolen a manuscript from a student, who handed him an amazing, handwritten thesis draft, with only one copy in existence, before disappearing. Connor seemed to care a great deal about his students, which made the theft an odd choice, but I think real humans can be pushed to out-of-character actions in desperation, so I bought that he was desperate enough to steal the draft.

But Madeline, the actual author of the novel, reappears. She agrees not to immediately expose him as a thief and a fraud, if he’ll pay her his royalties from the book she wrote. Of course Connor, in the defense that every rich person has told every poor person, insists that wasn’t even that much money, and anyway he spent it all the house (that he owns) and he still has to go to his (stable, professional) day job! He’s not rich or something! It’s one of the few nuanced moments in this novel — it’s an amount of money that didn’t seem like much to Connor would be life-changing to Madeline, money that should be hers, and she still can’t get it.

After a really promising beginning, I found the rest of Kill All Your Darlings underwhelming. The turns were less twists about the manuscript or the murders, and more about men behaving badly. The question was less about how the incriminating details made it into Connor’s book, but which scenes of men being creeps were tied to the manuscript mystery, and which were just another day of another man being kind of a dick to the women around him. ( )