Psychological Thriller Review: Kill All Your Darlings | David Bell

If you are anything like me, back-to-school season will have you wanting all of the dark academia, set-on-college-campus, university-themed thrillers. I hadn’t had a chance to read David Bell’s dark academic thriller, Kill All Your Darlings yet but I have read other books by him and enjoyed so I snagged the audiobook from my library.

This book delivered the twists, turns, and salacious plot all set on a university campus that I was looking for. In Kill All Your Darlings, a college professor is faced with an impossible choice after plagiarizing his book. Did that tempt you to give this a try? It certainly did for me!

About the Book | Kill All Your Darlings

Setting

The book takes place on the fictional campus of Commonwealth University set in a smaller town in Kentucky and loosely based on Western Kentucky University, where the author is an English professor.

Plot

English professor Connor Nye has just published his first novel, about a friendship between two women in a small college town, and the events leading to the murder of one of the women that rocks the small town to its’ core. The book is brilliant, captivating even the most thriller-averse readers.

The only problem is, Connor didn’t write it…

The novel was written by one of his brightest senior thesis students two years earlier, submitted as a hand-written manuscript before she disappeared. But the day his book published, his former student Madeline turns back up on his doorstep. Connor can’t admit he stole the manuscript without destroying his career, but that may be the least of his concerns.

It turns out the murder in the manuscript is eerily similar to the murder of a local woman three years earlier. And there are details in the book only the murderer could know. Now, Connor finds himself as the prime suspect in a murder he didn’t even know had occurred, unable to clear his name without ruining himself in the process.

It’s not clear what Madeline wants, but Connor knows he is stuck with an impossible choice: admit he plagiarized and destroy is career, or potentially go down for a murder he didn’t commit…

Central Characters

Connor Nye is the primary narrator and an English professor at Commonwealth University. Madeline O’Brien is a former student of Connor’s who disappeared two years earlier just shy of graduating. Madeline is bright and the original author of the novel Connor later publishes. Sophie is a woman in her late twenties who lives in the same town as Commonwealth University and was murdered several years earlier. Rebecca is a current student at Commonwealth University working on her thesis with Connor and narrates some parts of the book. Preston White and Lance Hoffman are colleagues of Connor’s in the English department.

Review | Kill All Your Darlings

From beginning to end, this story gripped me. I couldn’t figure out how Madeline could have included those details about the murder. She must know who did it, but the question was if she would share it. Her disappearance and reappearance were shrouded in a fog of mystery about the murdered woman. Were they friends? Was Madeline the other woman from the novel? And who really committed the crime?

Connor was an interesting character because I didn’t fully like him, but I did empathize with him. He clearly was in the wrong for plagiarizing the novel, and he knew it. At the same time, the pressures of academia are intense. Publish or perish is no joke, as someone in academia myself.

One interesting theme that David Bell weaves through the novel is that every writer has at least one great book in them, and that often the ability to draw on something from their life is what makes the book what it is. For Madeline, it’s clear the friendship between the two women from different walks of life that readers responded to was drawn from her own experience. Connor says to her at one point that after the death of his wife and son, he wrote hundreds of first drafts of manuscripts that all started with the person’s family dying. He couldn’t break away from it, but he also wasn’t ready to go there.

Connor is also a watcher of others. This is a theme I’ve seen done well in a few other creative works, and it worked here. Connor would look into homes and dream about the perfect life the people who lived there had. It hadn’t occurred to Connor that his looked the same until he was outside his own home one day and saw his wife holding their son. Later, after their death, Connor is drawn to couples who are early on in their relationship, when things are happy and they don’t know what challenges and sadness life may throw their way. There was something deeply sad and poetic about Connor’s desire to picture the happy lives of others during his grief.

The end had some great twists and turns. I also thought the different POVs worked great in this book, despite Connor narrating the bulk of the chapters. We got some important tidbits through other POVs that made the ending come together for the reader.

I won’t spoil the ending, but I did like how this started as a book about plagiarism and it wound through twists and turns to be about a bigger message in academia. It was set up well throughout the book so it landed with a bang by the ending.

Captivating and hard to put down!