- Serial murders in fiction, Detective and mystery stories, Fiction, Fiction, mystery & detective, general
A Kiss Before Dying is the story of young man who has just come out of the horror of World War II and is loath to return to the quieter horror of the manufacturing town he grew up in. These two backgrounds have made him what he is: a young man on the make possessing a complete immorality in the ways he makes it. When he meets Dorothy Kingship, who loves him deeply and whose father just happens to be the copper king of America, he has it made. But so devious is his brilliant mind and so strange is fate that it is only with her murder that he is able to reach the pinnacle in Kingship Copper. From the first page, this novel has the kind of emotional pull that good storytellers have always evoked, You will not be able to abandon this ruthless young man. You will have to find out what he does, step by step, and what, in the end, is done to him.
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Character
Grave, classical in form, earnest and bleak.
- gravecomic
- classical in formformally daring
- earnestironic
- warmbleak
- unpretentiousprestige
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About the book
- Author
- Ira Levin
- First published
- 1953
- Pages
- 288
- Publisher
- Goldmann Verlag, Bruna, Dales Large Print Books
- Editions
- 54
- Language
- Japanese, Dutch, Chinese, German
- ISBN
- 9780671683887
Where to read
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On Open Library, 8 have read it and 116 want to.
“HIS PLANS HAD BEEN RUNNING SO BEAUTIFULLY, so goddamned beautifully, and now she was going to smash them all.”
Ira Levin was born in 1929 in New York City and is a graduate of New York University. He wrote television plays and short stories and, when he was twenty-two, A Kiss Before Dying. After two years of military service he turned to playwriting; No Time for Sergeants, adapted from Mac Hyman's novel was his most successful stage work, but his favorite is a musical called Drat! The Cat! for which he wrote the book and lyrics. Its early closing sent him back to novel writing, and the outcome was the diabolical chiller Rosemary's Baby. He has since written another play, Dr. Cook's Garden, filmed by Paramount Pictures in 1971, and he is nearing completon of another novel. He lives in Manhattan, is di
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