The Kill-Off

By: Jim Thompson

Narrated by: Robertson Dean, Coleen Marlo

Luane Devore's days are numbered. All her neighbors in the declining seaside resort town of Manduwoc want her dead. Some, like her young husband Ralph and his girlfriend Danny, want the thousands of dollars she keeps hidden under the mattress she spends her days resting on. Others want her to stop her malicious gossip--some of which could ruin lives.

Told from multiple perspectives, The Kill-Off tells the story of a woman not long for this earth--but who will finally take matters into their own hands, and when? THE KILL-OFF was the basis of Maggie Greenwald's critically acclaimed film of the same name.

Critic reviews

"The best suspense writer going, bar none."—The New York Times

"My favorite crime novelist-often imitated but never duplicated."—Stephen King

"If Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett and Cornell Woolrich would have joined together in some ungodly union and produced a literary offspring, Jim Thompson would be it...His work...casts a dazzling light on the human condition."—Washington Post

"Like Clint Eastwood's pictures it's the stuff for rednecks, truckers, failures, psychopaths and professors ... one of the finest American writers and the most frightening, [Thompson] is on best terms with the devil. Read Jim Thompson and take a tour of hell."—The New Republic

"The master of the American groin-kick novel."—Vanity Fair

"The most hard-boiled of all the American writers of crime fiction."—Chicago Tribune

Thompson experiments

I always enjoy JT and have read/listened to several by now. This is a little different for him using rotating narrators to tell the story from each potential suspects view. You get an idea of each persons motives for wanting the woman dead and it's still a mystery until the end. It would have been nice to have completely different readers for each character so you'd get a clearer delineation of voices, once in a while they sound the same and so you lose track a little of certain people thinking you've heard them before, but actually as it turns out each view only appears once, knowing that ahead of time will help. Not a shoot em up as perhaps suggested by the title, but a good Thompson small town crime story.