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... but when? The Kill-Off was the basis of Maggie Greenwald's critically acclaimed film of the same name.

©1957 Jim Thompson, copyright © renewed 1985 by Alberta H. Thompson (P)2011 Hachette Audio

Critic reviews

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

"Thompson is always a fun ride." ( Library Journal)

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.