Kill My Darling

by Thanh Dinh, Cynthia Constantino (Editor), Tiago Araújo (Illustrator)

Kill My Darling is a noir fever dream dressed in sequins and bloodstains—a glittering descent into love, addiction, power, and the exquisite violence of wanting someone too much.

Angela is not running from the body.
She is walking toward it.

When the novel opens, she is already disposing of her lover—Bambi Raymond, a famous rapper, a cultural idol, a beautiful ruin. The man the world adored is now a secret rotting beneath her hands. Fame does not die quietly. Neither does love. And neither, it turns out, does guilt.

Told in fractured timelines that shimmer between past and present, Kill My Darling traces the anatomy of a relationship that burned too bright to survive. Angela meets Bambi at the edge of his a rising star with a god complex, a poet of destruction, a man adored by crowds and devoured by his addictions. He is charismatic, brilliant, cruel, and terrifyingly tender. He is the kind of man people excuse until it is far too late.

Angela knows better.
She stays anyway.

What unfolds is not a romance but a collision—between desire and self-preservation, between art and annihilation, between the woman Angela wants to be and the woman she is becoming. Drugs blur memory. Love mutates into obsession. Violence slips in quietly, like a lover who knows where you hide your knives. As Bambi spirals deeper into madness, Angela begins to fracture, haunted by hallucinations, doubling identities, and a voice that refuses to let the past stay buried.

The novel moves with cinematic precision—from dim Toronto cafés and neon-lit studios to hotel rooms thick with smoke, paranoia, and unspoken threats. It is glamorous without mercy, poetic without apology. Every scene glitters; every sentence cuts. The city itself becomes an accomplice, pulsing with desire and decay.

At its core, Kill My Darling is a psychological portrait of a woman pushed past the edge—by love, by power, by the myth of men who are allowed to destroy everything and still be called geniuses. It interrogates celebrity culture, gendered violence, and the romanticization of male self-destruction, asking a dangerous What does it cost to love a monster when the world insists he is a god?

As Angela’s grip on reality loosens, the narrative tightens—spiraling toward a revelation that reframes the murder, the love, the lies she tells herself to survive. Nothing is clean. No one is innocent. And redemption, if it exists at all, comes with teeth.

Blending literary noir, psychological thriller, and poetic confession, Kill My Darling will appeal to readers of dark, stylized fiction that refuses to look away—fans of glamour-soaked tragedy, unreliable narrators, and stories where love is both the crime and the motive.

This is a novel about women who survive by becoming dangerous.
About beauty that bruises.
About love that kills—and what remains when it does.

Pretty.
Witty.
Bloody.

A kiss with a knife hidden behind the smile.

288 pages, Kindle Edition

Expected publication January 31, 2026

Reviews

[Emily · Rating 2 out of 5]

Somewhere between philosophic prose, there is a story about love, life and death. This may be a hit for some people, but it fell short for me.

Thank you to NetGalley + publisher for the ARC!

[Kate · Rating 3 out of 5]

What happens when Hell, Purgatory and Paradise are the same person? You get this manic, fever-dream of a novel. I am sitting here thinking of how to describe it, trying to figure out if I like it, and all I can think is "this book reads like a Rothko painting." If you know, you know.

Kill My Darling tackles the manipulative power of young love, the naivety that comes with falling for someone you think you can fix, and the long-term ramifications that come with staying in them too long (and killing them, ofc). The story oscillates between the past and present, however, the past chapters also hop between current and future thoughts, giving you a sense that the main character Angela in the present may not remember the timelines of the past. The actual murder is both primary and secondary to the story; it is less about the death itself (how), which you would get with a mystery, and more about the events that led to that point (why), which you get more in a thriller. I am not sure this book fits well in any one box, though.

The book synopsis references "sequins and bloodstains" and "glamour soaked tragedy" which give Gatsby vibes. These descriptions did not feel appropriate for my interpretation of the book. I mean… they met in a grungy club after Angela threw up on Bambi, the male lead, who thinks himself brilliant but is really just a confident narcissist who projects brilliance (although, I do believe Angela did think of him as brilliant). Every "tender" moment was underpinned with violence; there was nothing glamorous about this relationship or the environment. It is actually a very scary representation of how young women that are exposed to violence by men, may accept more subtle forms of violence in the future because it is comparatively better.

As someone who appreciates poetry, I really enjoyed Dinh’s lyrical writing style. It worked well for this more descriptive and emotional story telling. With that being said, I loathed every chapter with Bambi in it (which is a lot). There were a handful of chapters that highlighted Bambi and Angela’s first three days together, and the timing of the massive declarations during this time felt off contextually. These two were together for about five years, there is no need for the 72 hour insta-love, gothic-Hallmark meet-cute. I fully believe she fell in love with him, in the way that love was able to manifest, but I think it would have been more balanced if his nefarious side appeared at increasing intensity over time instead of literally right away on the same day she announces her perpetual, undying love for him.

Finally, there is a battering ram of analogies. Like, probably don’t need the divine comedy referenced ~5 times in the first 37 pages, trust in your writing and for your readers to pick up on this.

There is another Goodreads review by Demetri that goes in-depth on major themes that I encourage you to read if you are thinking of picking up this title.

For me: ⭐⭐/5 but a ⭐ ⭐ ⭐/5 was provided as I do think that a very esoteric group of individuals would love it though.

A free copy of Kill My Darling was provided through NetGalley and Writerly Book Press in exchange for an honest review. As always, I thank the author for their craft and the opportunity to review their book!

[Liz · Rating 2 out of 5]

Kill My Darling is undeniably atmospheric and intentional in its tone. The author’s voice leans into lyrical, almost philosophical reflections on life, death, and what it means to keep going, which will resonate with readers who enjoy introspective and emotionally heavy narratives.

For me personally, the story felt extremely bleak, and while I could clearly see and appreciate the author’s intent, the overall tone made it difficult for me to fully connect. It ultimately wasn’t quite my cup of tea, though I think readers drawn to darker, contemplative prose will find a lot to admire here.

[Aida ☾ · Rating 2 out of 5]

I never thought I would complain about a book being too lyrical and philosophical, but I finally found one.

[Demetri Papadimitropoulos · Rating 4 out of 5]

A book like “Kill My Darling” arrives already wearing its own warning label – not only the explicit preface that lays out the psychic weather ahead, but the prose itself, which moves with the glittery volatility of a streetlight reflected in a puddle: seductive, unstable, and always one step from going dark. Thanh Dinh’s literary noir is, at its core, a story about how people narrate themselves into a livable shape. That shape may be a lover’s body, a dead man’s name, a mother’s role, a saint’s patience, a criminal’s swagger, a doctor’s authority. It may also, more frighteningly, be a performance so persuasive that the performer forgets where the costume ends. The novel’s central trick – and its most serious question – is whether self-invention is a means of survival or merely another kind of violence.

Angela, its narrator, begins with a corpse and a certainty: she has disposed of her lover, Bambi Raymond, a famous rapper, and she will tell you how to die. But the book’s pleasures are rarely those of plot, in the conventional sense. The suspense here is psychological and theological: a thriller whose engine is not simply what happened, but who gets to decide what it means. Angela’s voice is the book’s signature – feverish, lyric, mordant, sometimes perversely funny, and always a little hallucinatory, as if she is speaking to us from inside a smoke-filled room where confession and performance are indistinguishable. She narrates like someone trying to control the shape of the story before the story controls her.

Dinh writes in a register that might be described as glamour-soaked grief. Toronto, Montreal, Chinatown bakeries, hospital corridors, highway exits, club interiors – these spaces aren’t merely settings but stages, lit in neon and moral fog. The book understands, in a distinctly contemporary way, how the modern city can feel like a machine designed to keep you anonymous until it suddenly demands proof of who you are. Angela’s world is full of institutions that claim to be neutral – hospitals, police stations, bureaucratic forms, “verification” protocols – and yet the book repeatedly shows how the body is never neutral inside them. A pregnant woman’s weakness becomes spectacle. A patient’s history becomes a shorthand. A person’s credibility is weighed by the people who have the power to write the notes.

If “Kill My Darling” were only a stylish noir about celebrity, obsession, and murder, it would still be an accomplished piece of atmosphere. But the novel’s ambition is stranger and more morally complicated. Its true drama begins when Bambi’s absence refuses to stay absent – not as a ghostly metaphor, but as an active presence that migrates. Angela’s relationship with Pierre, Bambi’s twin, is the book’s most unsettling invention: a triangle where one point is dead, one is living, and the third is a name that can be worn like a mask. Pierre is a psychiatrist, intelligent, brittle, and increasingly unmoored – a man whose professional language (diagnosis, constitution, dosage, protocol) becomes one more dialect of control. Angela, meanwhile, is a woman who both resists and craves control, who mocks sentimentality even as she longs for its shelter. Their bond is at once a romance, a conspiracy, and an argument with God – the kind of argument that doesn’t end in faith so much as exhaustion.

Dinh’s most incisive theme is substitution: the idea that in a world built to punish certain people more than others, you might survive by becoming someone else. The book returns to this motif with a ferocity that feels less like clever plotting and more like lived desperation. Pierre lives in his brother’s shadow and then, in a late and sinister twist, discovers that the shadow has been cast deliberately. Angela lives in the aftermath of her own choices, but also in the aftermath of systems that have taught her to expect judgment before help. Even love, in this novel, is a kind of substitution – not a pure exchange between two souls, but a barter between two damaged people trading what they have: attention, safety, the fantasy of being seen as “good.”

The Chinatown chapter is a miniature of what Dinh does best: a scene that is simultaneously physical and performative. Angela enters the bakery sweating, nauseated, hungry, counting down to an engineered fainting fit like a director timing a cue. The sensory detail is lavish – black tea, powdered sugar, egg tarts, the imagined squish of dough – and then the scene turns, as if the sugar has curdled. Angela’s hunger becomes both literal and metaphoric: hunger for food, for care, for the right to be unobserved. Her staged collapse is a small act of criminal theater, and yet it is also an indictment of how easily a woman’s distress becomes public property. Dinh keeps the reader in the double bind: we recoil at the manipulation even as we recognize the logic that produced it. In this world, you perform illness because the system rewards performance, not truth.

The hospital sequences, similarly, are among the novel’s sharpest pages. Dinh has a keen ear for the cruelty that can hide inside professionalism – the way pity can masquerade as empathy, the way “patient first” can become a slogan rather than a practice. Lucille, the doctor who flirts with Pierre while policing Angela’s moral worth, is drawn with the book’s most biting satirical touch. She is not a villain in the melodramatic sense; she is something more recognizable: a person who believes in her own decency, and therefore cannot see the harm she does. The older OB-GYN, by contrast, offers the rare relief of competence without contempt, a reminder that institutions do contain individuals capable of dignity. That tension – between the system and the person inside it – gives the book some of its most contemporary resonance. In an era of understaffed wards, fraying safety nets, and public arguments about what care should look like, Dinh’s hospital is not a backdrop but a moral arena.

And then there is Pierre’s unraveling, which Dinh handles with an unusual combination of theatricality and restraint. The book is careful, in a way that feels ethically deliberate, not to turn mental illness into a mere twist. Pierre’s instability is woven into his identity as a healer who has absorbed too much suffering and mistaken it for his responsibility. His monologues about guilt, faith, and the ghosts of patients – especially the story of the 17-year-old on suicide watch – are some of the novel’s most direct writing. They are also, at times, where Dinh’s ambition risks tipping into excess. The prose loves intensity; it loves the declarative sentence that arrives like a verdict. Often that intensity is earned – it feels like the only language Angela has left. But occasionally the book reaches for metaphysical grandeur when the scene would be more devastating if it trusted plainness.

Still, one of the novel’s strengths is its refusal to clean up its own mess. “Kill My Darling” is a book that understands that ugliness can be part of the truth. Angela is not written to be likable. She is written to be legible. Her cruelty is not excused, but neither is it fetishized. The book keeps asking: what happens when a person has been trained, by experience, to believe that tenderness is a trap? Angela’s narration is full of self-scorning jokes, sudden tenderness, and the kind of metaphoric thinking that feels like a survival strategy – if you can turn your life into art, perhaps it won’t destroy you completely.

In that sense, Dinh’s novel belongs to a lineage of women’s noir and psychological confession – books that are less interested in solving a crime than in anatomizing the desire that made the crime possible. There are echoes here of “Gone Girl” in the way the narrative weaponizes intimacy and performance, though Dinh is less interested in twist mechanics than in the spiritual hangover of obsession. There are shades of “My Year of Rest and Relaxation” in the narrator’s acid humor and refusal of moral uplift, though Dinh’s stakes are more overtly violent and tender. The book’s atmosphere – neon, sex, club culture, hallucination – might make some readers think of “Drive” or “Uncut Gems” in its sense of forward-leaning dread, but Dinh’s sensibility is more literary, more hymnlike in its recurrence of motifs: God, forgiveness, punishment, the body as evidence, love as poison, love as shelter.

The novel is also very much a book of our era in its quiet preoccupations. It is interested in how reputations are manufactured and monetized; how celebrity creates a god-shaped void that people try to fill with attention; how women’s bodies become contested sites – medically, legally, morally. Its undercurrent of trafficking and exploitation is not treated as mere sensational garnish, but as a shadow economy that thrives on indifference. And its recurring skepticism about institutions – who gets believed, who gets helped, who gets labeled – feels attuned to a moment when public trust is thin and systems are visibly strained. Dinh never turns these concerns into slogans. They are embedded in Angela’s lived experience: the suspicious stares, the procedural delays, the casual cruelty of people who assume the worst because assuming the worst is easier than offering care.

If the first half of the book is a kind of noir fever dream – murder, disposal, seduction, hallucination – the latter chapters pivot into something stranger: domesticity as thriller. The scenes of Angela and Pierre in their condo, arguing about love and identity while preparing for parenthood, have a claustrophobic power. Dinh is astute about the ways “normal life” can be its own kind of performance, especially for people who have never been safe inside it. When Pierre proposes – not as a grand romantic gesture but as an insistence on the possibility of ordinary happiness – the moment lands with genuine complexity. We can feel Angela’s recoil. We can also feel the temptation: the relief of being offered a structure, a name for what they are, a promise that the story might end in something other than punishment.

The epilogue’s structure – its slow slide from postpartum terror into a police procedural into an almost mythic “miracle” – is where the book’s contrivance is most visible. Evidence arrives. Plans are made. A postal strike becomes a plot hinge. A dead man, once again, seems to be pulling strings. Some readers will find these mechanics too neat, too engineered. Yet it’s worth considering that “Kill My Darling” is not trying to be realistic in the manner of a courtroom drama. It is trying to be realistic in the manner of trauma: the way life can feel orchestrated by forces you do not control, the way coincidence can read like fate, the way the dead can seem to direct the living because the living cannot bear the randomness otherwise. In Angela’s world, the miracle is not that a plan works. The miracle is that anyone survives long enough to want a future.

The book’s final image – a naming that is also a benediction, a child positioned as an argument against the past – is where Dinh’s impulse toward mythmaking pays off. The name “Jeannet Pauline Raymond” is not just a plot detail; it is a thesis: a refusal to let the dead remain only dead, a refusal to let the living remain only guilty. Dinh’s ending insists, with a kind of bruised optimism, that the future is not obliged to repeat the past – though it will certainly inherit it. The book’s title, “Kill My Darling”, becomes a command not only about murder but about surrender: kill the old attachments that keep you trapped, kill the fantasies that make you return to the same pain, kill even the idea of a “darling” ending if it prevents you from living.

That is, ultimately, what the novel offers: not moral clarity, but moral electricity. Its best pages crackle with intelligence and danger. Its weaker moments – the occasional overstatement, the occasional flattening of a secondary character into a function, the plot’s dependence on precisely timed revelations – are the price of a book that refuses moderation. Dinh writes like someone who does not trust subtlety to survive the night. And yet, when the book is at its most controlled, it can be quietly devastating: an old doctor defending a patient’s individuality; a woman realizing love can feel like a burden; a man who has spent his life saving others discovering he might deserve saving too.

For all its baroque flourishes, “Kill My Darling” has a surprisingly classical core. It is a tragedy with an insurgent belief in ordinary happiness – the kind that arrives not as a reward for virtue but as a stubborn choice made by people who have very little virtue left to spend. If perfection is too clean a word for a book this messy, then perhaps the more honest praise is that it is alive. It is messy in the way living is messy, and in the way surviving is messier. It is not a book that asks to be liked. It is a book that asks to be believed – and, more unsettlingly, it asks what belief costs.

In the end, I found myself admiring the novel’s nerve as much as its craft. Dinh has written a noir that is also a love story, a psychological case file, a theological argument, and a satire of the performances we call adulthood. It is a book that understands how easily “care” can become control, how easily “love” can become addiction, how easily “identity” can become a weapon. It also understands something rarer: that even after the worst things, people still want the simplest ones – a warm body beside them, a child’s hand grasping a finger, a life that does not require constant explanation.

For its lyric intensity, its moral daring, and its refusal to offer easy absolution, I would place “Kill My Darling” at 83 out of 100 – a flawed, forceful, strangely tender novel that leaves a bruise where a blessing might have been, and makes you consider how often the two are the same.

[Get Your Tinsel in a Tangle · Rating 3 out of 5]

Oh, this book does not want you to read it. It wants you to hallucinate it. Kill My Darling is not a novel so much as a fever breaking in real time, like someone just poured neon into your bloodstream and whispered “He’s dead, but that doesn’t mean he’s gone.” And then you, like Angela, keep walking toward the corpse anyway. Because love, guilt, grief? They don’t come with reverse gears.

We open after the murder. Not with a bang, but with a disposal. The world’s darling, Bambi Raymond, rapper, god, glamorized collapse in a fur coat, is dead under Angela’s trembling hands, and she’s narrating the burial like it’s a love poem and a confession at the same time. From there, the book spins through time like a broken record. 2020, 2025, Montreal, Toronto, a hospital hallway, a smoke-thick studio, a condo where someone may or may not be pretending to be their own ghost. It’s noir, yes. But noir soaked in molly and regret, wrapped in tinfoil, and screaming into a pillow.

Angela is an unreliable narrator in the same way a bomb is an unreliable birthday present. She’s funny, brutal, and spiraling so hard it feels like the prose is trying to claw its way off the page. Her relationship with Bambi is messy, terrifying, magnetic. Like watching someone pet a lion who’s already bitten them. He’s brilliant and broken in that specific way women are socialized to call genius. And Angela, in a thousand small ways, is trying to survive his orbit without losing her shape.

Except she does lose it. The timelines fracture. Identity becomes slippery. And then there’s Pierre. Ohhhh, Pierre. Bambi’s twin, but make it Catholic guilt with a medical degree. Their dynamic is... unsettling. Pierre wants to heal Angela. Or punish her. Or save her. Or become her. Or maybe become Bambi. I don’t know. There’s a lot of identity soup happening and not enough spoons. At one point, they’re raising a baby together while evading a federal investigation, and honestly? That’s not even top ten weirdest things that happen in this book.

And listen. This novel hates institutions. Hospitals, police, bureaucracy, academia, even goddamn postal workers catch a stray. Everyone is complicit. Everyone’s language is a leash. There’s a whole subplot where Angela fakes a fainting spell in a Chinatown bakery just to get access to a medical record. Because being sick is the only way the system will see her. And that’s the quiet part of the book.

The loud part? Is trauma with sequins on. Addiction, sexual manipulation, twin-swapping, weaponized empathy, systemic erasure, literal murder, and a fetus caught in the middle like a plot twist that got too real. And somehow... somehow it works. The prose dances dangerously close to melodrama, but always yanks itself back with some sharp little observation that leaves a papercut. It is exhausting in the way watching someone survive usually is.

But here’s the thing. The book wants to be mythic, and sometimes it pulls it off, but other times it just overreaches. The ending leans too hard on symbolic weight and plot convenience. A goddamn postal strike is the thing that tips the story into its final twist? Really? That’s less noir than it is sitcom cursed object energy. And while Angela’s voice is unforgettable, the characters around her start to blur. Pierre gets his full descent into chaos arc, but everyone else fades into furniture, especially once the narrative doubles down on trauma-as-style.

This book wants to be divine, but sometimes it just drowns in its own metaphor. Still gripping. Still vicious. But not quite as sharp as it thinks it is. Three stars. Feverish. Flawed. Ferociously itself.

Whodunity Award: For Making Me Suspect the Dead Guy Was Still Running the Plot from Beyond the Grave

Big chaotic thanks to Writerly Books and NetGalley for the ARC, which I accepted fully knowing it would emotionally destroy me and said “thank you” anyway like a little drama freak.

[Damla · Rating 5 out of 5]

Kill My Darling is a literary noir that refuses moderation. It is intense, excessive, lyrical, and morally unsettled, and those qualities are not flaws to be corrected but part of the book’s deliberate design.

The novel opens with a body and works backward, not to solve a crime but to anatomize a relationship. What matters here is not how the murder happened, but why it became possible. Told through fractured timelines and a feverish first-person voice, the narrative pulls the reader into Angela’s consciousness, where memory, guilt, desire, and self-mythology blur. The result is claustrophobic and immersive. There is no safe distance. You are asked to sit inside the damage.

At the center of the book is a sharp critique of power and its disguises. Bambi’s fame, charisma, and self-destruction are repeatedly aestheticized by the world around him, while Angela’s endurance is read as love rather than survival. The novel is particularly incisive in showing how violence does not always announce itself loudly. It arrives through excuses, through devotion, through the insistence that genius must be tolerated at any cost. Love here is not redemptive. It is addictive, destabilizing, and dangerous.

Formally, the book embraces excess. The prose is lush, metaphor-heavy, and often overwhelming. The emotional intensity rarely lets up. For some readers, this will feel like too much. For me, it felt honest. The repetition, the fixation, the relentless inward spiraling mirror the psychology of obsession and trauma rather than smoothing it into something palatable. This is not a novel interested in restraint. It is interested in truth as lived, not as refined.

The second half of the book deepens its moral complexity by shifting the terrain from obsession to aftermath, from destruction to survival. Angela’s relationship with Pierre introduces questions of substitution, control, and care that are just as unsettling as what came before. Institutions that claim neutrality, hospitals, police, bureaucracy, are shown to be anything but neutral, especially toward women whose bodies and credibility are constantly under scrutiny. The novel is at its strongest when it exposes how care itself can become another language of power.

What I admire most about Kill My Darling is its refusal to clean itself up. The characters are not likable. They are legible. The book offers no easy absolution, no moral shortcuts, and no tidy redemption. Survival, when it appears, is compromised and sharp-edged. The ending does not undo the damage. It simply insists that life continues anyway.

This is not a book that tries to be universally loved. It is a book that takes risks, trusts its own intensity, and commits fully to its vision. For its lyric ambition, psychological depth, and moral daring, this is a five-star read for me. It lingered, unsettled, and demanded to be taken seriously.

I received an advance review copy for free, and I am leaving this review voluntarily.

[Heather · Rating 4 out of 5]

Thank you Writerly Books Press for the ARC of Kill My Darling by Thanh Dinh for review consideration via NetGalley. All opinions are my own

⭐️3.75/5⭐️
This book is about a crazy love obsession. Love of life and the sweet release of rest. Freedom and the endless pursuit. Living, dying, being reborn. Choice. Separation. It's about searching for a different path in life. To kill your old self and chase after a new one. It's about suffering. So much suffering and to what end. It's about being thrust into a role you were and weren't wanting, trudging down it, surviving and persisting, even when you don't want to.

Bambi and Angela are star crossed lovers. The world rejectd them, they don't want that world anyway. They are running full force to live a life of their own. Driven by obsession, desire, passion they are both running from their past. To reinvent themselves amd just be.

Bambi had a bad upbringing. Angela did not. They meet one another one night and never part falling down a tragic existential rabbit hole.

Bambi is and enigma in his own right. Angela just want to seen, to be something else. Angela thinks he's god, but he's really a devil in disguise, but Angela devours his darkness. Following a misguided journey of the rejected just looking for salvation in whatever form they can grasp onto. They find freedom in self destruction.

Boy, Angela can cry. 85% of this book is this girl in tears.

Bambi was a monster, manipulative, narcissistic, and gas lighted Angela into his path to freedom, leaving her there to suffer the consequences. But she was not without freedom of choice, she chose to be. She chose to follow when she could have carved her own destiny. Angela's relationship with Bambi is the epitome of love is blind.


Did I like it, absolutely, but I was getting so bored reading Angela's waxing philosophical about literally everything. Oh, and her perpetual sobbing. But in the end, it was a beautiful story, so tragic and gritty and dark. A story about those who do not choose the "normal" path and the fight for survival.

[Maria reads SFF · Rating 3 out of 5]

My thanks to BookSirens for a free digital review copy of “Kill My Darling” by Thanh Dinh. All opinions are my own.
A Psychological Literary Noir about obsession, toxic relationships, addiction and mental struggles.
This is my first work by the author and I immediately got captivated by her unique poetic prose.
The trigger warnings listed at the beginning of the book should be taken seriously as this is a challenging reading experience that touches on extremely difficult topics.
The characters are flawed, raw and real, I found it difficult to look away from their fall, their struggle, their attraction to despair.
As with reality and life, things tend to repeat themselves and I do admit that a few times the repetition grated on me.
There was some profound philosophy, some thoughts that left space for interpretation, but even if I was forewarned that the book touched on religious discourse, I was not prepared for it to be so prominent.
I would recommend this novel to readers who seek to explore mental disorders, drug addiction, obsession, toxic relationships, the role of faith in the lives of people that feel punished by their lot in life.
As a reader I would love to read more from this author in the future. My hope is that religion (Christianity leaning) will not play such a leading role in her next work.

[Dayna Smith · Rating 4 out of 5]

Kill My Darling by Thanh Dinh is a dark, suspense-filled journey that lingers long after the last page. The story grips you with its tension from the very first chapter, drawing you into a world where danger is never far, secrets cut deep, and every character carries the weight of their past. Dinh’s writing is sharp, precise, and quietly menacing, creating an atmosphere thick with unease, anticipation, and a pulse of raw emotion.

The characters are flawed and compelling, their vulnerabilities and hidden motives making them feel achingly human. The tension between them crackles—sometimes violent, sometimes heartbreakingly fragile—and it keeps the stakes high and the pages turning. The plot moves with relentless momentum, blending suspense, intrigue, and subtle psychological depth in a way that keeps you on edge while still allowing moments of introspection and emotion to breathe.

While a few scenes could have been expanded for even greater impact, the strength of the characters and the intensity of the story more than make up for it. Kill My Darling is a dark, haunting read about trust, betrayal, and the fine line between love and obsession—a moody, atmospheric tale that pulls you in and doesn’t let go.

[Holly · Rating 5 out of 5]

"We only miss the dead when we need their salvation and protection in a dire situation".

This book was so good and made me feel like i'm going insane, i finished this book on the 14th it is the 18th now and i still dont know if i'll be able to give a good review because i'm still hungover from it.
This book was very well written and about 90% of the time made me feel like i'm one of the characters and feel all the stress, sadness, madness that the character is feeling, which is great in a book. On some parts this book felt like it was too much emotionally but then i forced myself to keep going and it got better and the ending is worth going through the madness.
This story might as well be someone's diary because of how it was written and the information we gor from it, and adding the fact that the themes of this book (for example; substance abuse, mental health) should be talked about more especially when it'g going on more and more and mental health these days is talked about, but not enough.
This book might help some people with their problems but it also might make some people feel worse, but if you feel worse after reading this then you have to come back to this book later in life because it is very valuable even if it is very dark.

[Kayte Shearwood · Rating 4 out of 5]

If you are looking for a dark read that is poetic and heartbreaking this may be for you. Somewhere in a fever dream of addiction, self obsession, devotion, mental illness, and trauma. This isn’t a sweet read expect to come out battered and still thinking this is what you wanted. You will go through ups and downs with our characters and still stare at the wolf in sheep’s skin with adoring. Be sure to read your trigger warnings as this is a heavy read. It won’t treat you kindly but it’s oh so good. Would definitely recommend.

[Sarah Rassool · Rating 3 out of 5]

Kill My Darling is a beautiful tragedy that has you engrossed in the despair of three different characters, their past, present, and how they intend to ultimately change their future—if there is one. The relationship between Bambi and Angela is so heartbreakingly toxic that you only hope that something can go her/their way. Dinh did a phenomenal job at depicting the hurt, growth, and bleeding scars of the characters that you almost find yourself the therapist in the story uncovering the truth and where the ending will take us.

[Kat M · Rating 5 out of 5]

I really enjoyed getting to read this book, it was a great blend of psychological thriller and noir and was able to tell the story that I was hoping for from the description. The characters were so well written and enjoyed going on this journey with the characters. I thought it was a strong concept and enjoyed getting into this plot and how the characters worked. Thanh Dinh wrote this so well and enjoyed getting to read this.

I received an advance review copy for free, and I am leaving this review voluntarily.