We Asked 13 Novelists, From Lee Child to Ruth Ware, ‘What’s the Best Murder You Ever Wrote?’

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/26/books/lee-child-ruth-ware-my-favorite-murder.html

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More women than men choose to kill people with poison, but one of my male characters in “Strawberry Yellow” uses ordinary rhubarb to murder his nemesis. It actually makes perfect sense as he’s a farmer and the mystery takes place in the salad bowl of agricultural California. The leaves of rhubarb contain a high level of oxalic acid, which can cause kidney failure. Boil the leaves and mix them together with chopped rhubarb and strawberries to make the most beautiful and deadly pie.

Hirahara’s next novel, “Iced in Paradise,” will be out in September.

Stripped of the Saul Black pseudonym I can’t lie: If a novelist’s literary murders are his children then the apple of this father’s eye has to be Jake Marlowe’s unsurpassable homicide, in which he not only kills and eats his wife but, since she’s pregnant at the time, his unborn child as well. See “The Last Werewolf.”

Speaking as Saul Black, however, I have a lasting soft spot for the murder that opens “The Killing Lessons.” Partly because when I wrote the scene I had no idea that it was going to be anything more than a doomed genre experiment, and there’s a retrospective pleasure in having proved myself (happily) wrong. But mainly I’m fond of it because it caters to the writerly sadism of getting readers to care about characters I know in a matter of paragraphs are going to be violently killed. I’m not proud of this delight in upsetting people, but there you are.

Duncan’s next novel, “Anything for You,” will be out in November under the pseudonym Saul Black.

I try to keep my most gruesome murders offstage, so to speak. What happens before and after a killing is far more interesting to me than the crime itself. But when gory details are necessary, there’s no rule saying you can’t have a little fun with them. And it was deliciously macabre fun devising the killing sprees at the heart of “Final Girls,” my novel about three survivors of horror-movie-like massacres. I felt like the director of an old-school slasher flick, dropping killers into the hoariest of locations — a sorority house, a roadside motel, a cabin in the woods — and making my would-be Laurie Strodes fight their way out.

Sager’s most recent novel is “Lock Every Door.”

My favorite murder is one committed by Lily Kintner in “The Kind Worth Killing.” Lily is an amiable sociopath, someone who tries to limit her murders to those who deserve it. Early in the book, she offs an unfaithful college boyfriend by first hiding his EpiPen, then crushing up some cashews (he’s very allergic) and adding them to a chicken korma. He comes home from a night of drinking, inhales the Indian food and dies while searching for the EpiPen that would save his life. Lily calmly watches. She’s gotten her revenge, and while his death may look suspicious, no one could ever prove that a murder has been committed. Death by cashew. A perfect crime.

Swanson’s next novel, “Eight Perfect Murders,” will be out in March 2020.

[ Read how novelist Lisa Gardner researches murder at The Body Farm. ]

I’m not big on unusual deaths, like by garbage compactor or air pressure chamber or something like that. Most of my books open with a disappearance or a surprise so that the killings I remember best are the ones that break your heart, the ones that resonate. They are also spoilers. In “The Stranger,” which we are currently filming for Netflix, we get to know a certain character, get to know his (or her) life, feel for them and their awful predicament, want well for them — and so bam, when it doesn’t work out, when they are murdered not even a third of the way through the book, we mourn that loss and want justice. Perhaps my most memorable murder occurs when the protagonist of a novel, the narrator who has told us the story from Page 1, gets shot and killed in the final pages. The book then skips ahead 25 years and we are seeing the aftermath from another perspective because the narrator is dead. I can’t list the books because, well, spoiler. In “Hold Tight,” a quiet 12-year-old girl saves the day by killing someone, thanks in part to the fact that she was snooping and misbehaving.

Coben’s most recent novel is “Run Away.”

As a writer it’s always tempting to be fondest of the book you’re working on, but since I haven’t actually committed the murder in my current work-in-progress yet, it would feel like a bit of a cheat to choose that one. My crimes usually take place off the page, which perhaps makes them harder to rank, but in terms of Christie-ish cleverness, I have a soft spot for the elaborate plan executed in “The Woman in Cabin 10.” Set on a cruise ship, it’s one of the most coldblooded crimes I’ve ever devised — a murder committed in international waters using a method designed to leave detectives wondering not just whodunit but did it happen at all? It’s a plan predicated on a single driving force: a desire to kill, and get away without even a stain of suspicion.

Ware’s next novel, “The Turn of the Key,” will be out in August.

The death that stands out the most for me is from “The Lost Ones,” my debut novel. There’s a fight on a boat, which then moves into the ocean. It was inspired by an experience I had as a stunt double for a Canadian TV show called “The Listener,” where I had to do a fight scene on a boat and then plunge into freezing water in the middle of winter. I’ll never forget the shock of it, as well as the panic that set in. Parts of that experience came back to me when I was writing that death scene, so it felt more personal.

Kamal’s most recent novel is “It All Falls Down.”

I saw a review online that called the Reacher series “a detective series in which the detective commits more homicides than he solves,” so I’m going with one of his, from “The Enemy,’” in which Reacher discovers corruption in the Army’s upper ranks and feels disillusioned. This was my eighth book, and the bad guys were still named and styled after the bosses who fired me from my previous job.

“‘I thought you were one bad apple,’ I said. ‘But the whole barrel is bad. The good apples are the rare ones.’

“He stared at me.

“‘You ruined it for me,’ I said. ‘You and your rotten friends.’

“‘Ruined what?’

“‘Everything.’

“I stood up. Stepped back. Clicked the Beretta’s safety to Fire.

“He stared at me.

“‘Goodbye, Colonel Willard,’ I said.

“I put the gun to my temple. He stared at me.

“‘Just kidding,’ I said.

“Then I shot him through the center of the forehead.”

Child’s next Jack Reacher novel, “Blue Moon,” will be out in October.

I’ve had a serial killer cut out my characters’ hearts and I’ve drowned others in a plane crash. I had a daughter run over her mother while (spoiler alert) sleep-driving. Others have died in the Armenian genocide and the Holocaust in ways that are historically precise and thus particularly disturbing. Those deaths stay with me.

But I think the murder that haunts me the most is that of the money manager in “The Flight Attendant” — but not because of how or why he’s killed. It’s the idea that Cassie Bowden, a woman who’s among my favorite heroines in my work, fears that she may have cut his throat with glass shards from a bottle of vodka. Cassie is a blackout drunk and a mess, but I always felt her childhood pain. Her story (and her doubts) leave me a little broken inside.

And I like that.

Bohjalian’s next novel, “The Red Lotus,” will be out in March 2020.

I’ve always felt the job of crime fiction is to hold up a mirror to society and show us not just who we are, but who we want to be. In “The Kept Woman,” I write about a sports agent who covers up crimes for his serial rapist client. This isn’t a difficult scenario to imagine in the real world, but since art doesn’t always have to imitate life, I was able to extract vengeance on everyone involved. I had a character slip antifreeze into the agent’s drinks. Ethylene glycol poisoning is extremely slow and lethal — shutting down the victim’s organs one by one, keeping him cognizant until the very end so that he knows that he’s completely helpless. Sort of like being assaulted against your will. That a woman was the one who poisoned him made the revenge extra sweet.

Slaughter’s next novel, “The Last Widow,” will be out in August.

My favorite murder has to be that of Jack in “Behind Closed Doors,” not only because he deserves to die but also because Millie, my favorite character of all time, is at the origin of his murder. Millie has Down syndrome and sees things in a very black-and-white way — Jack is a bad man and bad men deserve to die. She is also very intuitive. She knows that Grace, her sister, is trapped in a terrible situation and quickly realizes that she is the only one who can help her. She looks for a solution and cleverly supplies Grace with the means to give Jack the death he absolutely deserves, making it the perfect murder.

Paris’s next novel, “The Dilemma,” will be out in June 2020.

An Egyptologist friend invited me to Poughkeepsie, N.Y., to watch the CT scanning of an Egyptian mummy. As we watched the images appear on the computer screen, I had a chilling thought: What if the scan revealed a surprise? What if, buried deep in the muscle of this 2,000-year-old man, we saw a bullet? That’s what happens in my novel “The Keepsake,” where Dr. Maura Isles discovers that a local museum’s “ancient” Egyptian mummy is actually a modern-day murder victim. I thought I’d come up with a unique idea — until I learned there’d been a real case (in Pakistan) of killers mummifying their murder victim. When it comes to crime, it seems there really is nothing new under the sun.

Gerritsen’s next novel, “The Shape of Night,” will be out in October.

Most fictional murders are violent events to move the plot along and the only question is, Whodunit? But in my view, a well-written murder should pose more complex questions. In my new book, “The Russia Account,” I have my heroes find a body in the lounge of a yacht surrounded by bullet holes and spent cartridges; then they discover a wounded man with a gun in the adjoining room. I love that murder scene, because the reader isn’t thinking at all about whodunit — presumably the two men shot each other — but is instead asking a whole host of much more interesting questions about what’s going on. I don’t want to give too much away, but that’s my favorite murder I’ve written so far because it opens up the mystery in a particularly exciting way.

Coonts’s next novel, “The Russia Account,” will be out in August.