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the complete review - fiction

Winter Kills

by
Richard Condon

general information | review summaries | our review | links | about the author

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Our Assessment:

B- : a (too) wild conspiracy-thriller

See our review for fuller assessment.

  From the Reviews:

• "Mr. Condon has taken full advantage of the recent history that his story so obviously departs from. That history is still very much alive in our imaginations, so there is something gratifying about playing games with it, even if the games are outlandish. And they don't seem so outlandish. (...) Winter Kills is grand entertainment. If my only complaint is that I caught on too early what the ultimate outcome would be, I can let it pass because there are so many surprising twists before that outcome is realized. For my money, this is the best book Mr, Condon has written since The Manchurian Candidate." - Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, The New York Times
  
  
• "Winter Kills is instead a triumph of satire and knowledge, with a delicacy of style that puts Condon once again into the first rank of American novelists. (...) Winter Kills succeeds so brilliantly because the Kennedy assassination furnished Condon with a familiar mythic landscape through which his Gulliver-like hero can wander, simultaneously prey to Lilliputian politics, Brobdingnagian physicality, Laputan science, and Houyhnhnm moralism. (...) Condon has created a paranoid novel that does not leave us trapped inside its world, but functions instead as a liberation, exposing through the gentle orders of fiction the way we have been programmed to believe anything in print." - Leo Braudy, The New York Times Book Review
  
  
• "It's shrewd plotting (.....) The real hero of Winter Kills is the almighty American dollar. The moral of the work is that we're all for sale. (...) Mr Condon has many virtues as a story-teller (.....) And yet, by the end of the book, the normal reader over here may well have wearied of such comprehensive turpitude, of such magisterial venality. There isn't a single attractive character in the action" - Godfrey Smith, Sunday Times
  
  
• "It should be enough to say that Winter Kills is a gothic farce (.....) Condon clearly wrote the novel to take his suspicions for a stroll (.....) Condon has unraveled. The world's villainy simply does not work so simply. To pretend that it does is mindless mischief." - John Skow, Time
  
  
• "A good read, I suppose, but because the events of November 1963 in Dallas, Texas are still fresh in the memory, the book leaves a nasty taste in the mouth." - Susan Hill, The Times

Please note that these ratings solely represent the complete review's biased interpretation and subjective opinion of the actual reviews and do not claim to accurately reflect or represent the views of the reviewers. Similarly the illustrative quotes chosen here are merely those the complete review subjectively believes represent the tenor and judgment of the review as a whole. We acknowledge (and remind and warn you) that they may, in fact, be entirely unrepresentative of the actual reviews by any other measure.

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The complete review's Review:

       Winter Kills is a conspiracy-thriller about the assassination of the American president. It's not quite the Kennedy-assassination, but it sure resembles it: on 22 February 1960 forty-two-year-old President Timothy Kegan is shot while parading in an open car in Philadelphia. The apparent shooter, Willie Arnold is quickly arrested -- but, Lee Harvey Oswald-like, is shot: "in the basement of the Philadelphia Police and Courts Building while Arnold, handcuffed to a Philadelphia detective and surrounded by more than seventy Philadelphia police, was being led to a waiting police car". There's a big investigation into the assassination -- the Pickering Commission, which eventually publishes a twenty-six volume report but still concludes that Arnold had been the lone gunman, even as sixteen people who "had some kind of information about the assassination" and should have been called before the Commission never testified because they died under mostly mysterious circumstances.
       The novel begins in early 1974, with Nick Thirkfield -- Timothy's much younger (now forty-one-year-old) half-brother -- working in the South China Sea and getting an urgent call to the bed of a dying man who wants to make a confession: that he's the one who had killed the president fourteen years earlier. With a lawyer and stenographer present, they hear the dying man's confession; there's enough to it -- notably, the claim that the killer had hidden the rifle he used in the building he took the shots from and that it should still be there -- that Nick feels compelled to follow up, and immediately sets out to do so.
       The rifle is, in fact, where the assassin claimed it would be -- but practically everyone privy to any of the information that is being unearthed winds up dead in short order; it's that kind of novel, the bodies piling up so fast you can hardly keep track (but then also no one really bothering to -- the dead are discarded pretty fast and the details of their deaths not really bothered with too much -- obviously someone very powerful and well-connected is behind them, and that's good enough). There are even attempts on Nick's life, though he conveniently easily avoids them (in one case thanks to a stray cat that wandered into his motel room when room service came).
       The action zigs and zags, Nick on the hunt all across the country, repeatedly certain he's on the right trail only to find himself wrong-footed yet again. The present-day action only covers some ten days, but there are also chapters jumping back in time, describing some of the preparations for the assassination, for example.
       On the one hand, Nick worries about leaks about what he is looking into. He wants to get to the truth before his sniffing around gets out -- not least to force the current president's hand and have him re-open the case into his brother's death. For all that, Nick does reveal what he's doing to an awful lot of people -- and it sure looks like some of them are passing what they know on to the powers behind the assassination, as there are clear efforts to thwart and misdirect Nick pretty much every step of the way (as well as getting rid of any of the inconvenient people who may know too much (or, indeed, anything)).
       One person Nick keeps closely in the loop is Pa -- his, and Timothy's, father --, the very powerful, very wealthy (and very Joe Kennedy-like) Thomas Xavier Kegan. But it would be hard to keep Pa out of the loop -- he has eyes and ears (and listening devices) everywhere, and often seems to know what's going on with Nick before Nick tells him. (Pa is helped by his "house mastermind", Professor Cerutti, who works in an isolated island lair, collecting and analyzing masses of data that Pa can put to use -- and has, to consolidate power and make oodles of money, over the years.) Pa seems helpful -- and he sure has all the connections and seems to be able to make anything happen -- but one has to wonder whether Nick wouldn't be wiser not involving him so much .....
       Nick is constantly getting played -- sometimes impressively elaborately. Many of those he deals with are not who they appear to be or say they are -- though he generally learns very quickly that he's been fooled or sent on a fool's errand (and there are times when he is playing along as well -- there are a lot of games going on in Winter Kills). The sudden big twists keep Nick -- and the reader -- guessing, though it all gets pretty far-fetched pretty quickly; still, Condon does throw a few nice about-faces in.
       Along the way, Nick at one point realizes:

     Someone, somewhere was trying to teach him futility. This came to him with the clarity of a night. ball game -- shadowless and static. He had to try to keep in mind that, so far, only one pattern seemed to exist: a pattern of confusion and exhaustion intended to teach him that all striving was fruitless, that when he understood the futility, he would find peace and safety for the people he loved.

that the subject remain confused, that he become exhausted by the unrelenting confusion and, ultimately, hopeless that anything he could ever do, any effort he might ever make would produce any solution whatever inside his maze.

For decoration, the Metropolitan had sent four important pieces -- two paintings and two sculptures. There was a magnificent vaseful of two dozen long-stemmed roses from the directors of the hospital. But most decorative of all were the two nurses, Eve and Rose, beautiful young women with brave, starched white caps and great big knockers. One of them was reading to Pa from Barron's Weekly, the other was feeding him grapes, when Nick arrived.

He scooped her up and ran down the short hall with her into a bedroom with a large bed. He threw her on it, then threw himself on top of her and began to flop about trying to kiss her and get out of his clothing while refusing to give up his hold on her crotch. She got his clothes off at about the same time he got hers off. It was fierce. It was poignant. It was noisy. And it was very, very carnal. As they were reaching a third climax he proposed to her. But he did it just before she moved into exultant chords of orgasm bellowing "Yes, yes, yes!" to the extraordinary pleasure of the moment. He forgot she always responded just like that and thought she had agreed to marry him with enormous enthusiasm.

- M.A.Orthofer, 7 June 2026

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Links:

• Cherche Midi publicity page

• Liberum
• Los Angeles Review of Books

• IMDb page

• Official site
• Richard Condon at books and writers

• The Manchurian Candidate

• See Index of Mysteries and Thrillers
• See Index of Contemporary American fiction

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About the Author:

       American author Richard Condon lived 1915 to 1996.

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© 2026 the complete review

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