How To Kill Your Family: THE #1 SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER (Colour may vary) Paperback – 14 April 2022

I'd been recommended this novel by a few people and it had been very widely publicised on social media. I'd not read any detailed reviews though so didn't know what it was about.The book is 354 pages and 18 chapters.The story is written as first person narrative from the perspective of a woman in prison. She claims to be inside for killing someone who she didn't, whereas she has got away with the several people she has actually killed. The book takes the form of a sort of confessional memoir.There is a chatty style which speaks directly to the reader - promising of further revelations and suggesting how the reader should react as information is shared.This is an easy book to read which is full of dark humour.I had suspected that the title would be ironic so was surprised the narrator intends to literally kill her family members. The characters that the author creates and the protagonist kills are all extreme - most of them being beasts of people although whether they deserve to die is another matter.Bella Mackie is having fun with this idea and the result works for me. The book is full of clever and funny writing which I enjoyed tremendously. It is a unique premise which is quite remarkable in a huge world of novels and such a strong story that carries right through to the end.Grace is a psychopath and I enjoyed her company (not sure what that says about me), to the point that I wanted her to succeed even though I knew I shouldn't. I loved her many layers of personality that are explored as her life story is revealed.Delightfully there are many surprises along the way which make the book captivating but it is the consistent darkness of the humour used in a way that gives this book a unique feel. I loved every page of this book.

The underlying revenge theme of this thriller is intriguing, if not massively original, but with a couple of nice wrinkles. It's decently well written, albeit you could pick holes in some of the plot events if you were so inclined - but that goes for most thrillers to be fair.The anti-heroine of the piece is the highlight, well drawn and credible in her motivations, with some good exploration of the internal conflicts she has about being a merciless serial killer (!). The nominal bad guys are in some cases cardboard cut-outs, but one or two are more believable and provide the lead with some thinking about her activities and objectives.I was a shade cynical as I worked my through, wondering if the screamingly obvious twist was coming. But it didn't - instead, the author came up with a genuinely surprising and completely fiendish surprise which I very definitely didn't see coming, and on that basis this is a worth a light and entertaining read.

This was my book club’s October read, and for me, it was the best one so far!It felt refreshing and different, and I was hooked right from the beginning. Grace was such a mercurial character, and I wanted to know who was she supposed to have killed that had put her in prison if it wasn’t the people she had killed?!?I loved her personality; it bordered on indifference and cool, but at the same time, she had a hidden vulnerability. The author perfectly developed her, as any slight differences could have made her boring and seem like there wasn’t much about her, but the author got it just right.There were sections that dragged a little, when she would go off on a tangent in her ramblings. So, I did feel like I rushed through them to get to the gritty stuff. I loved all the killings; they were just so wacky and different. Also, hilarious how it all just fell into place.When I first read the ending, I was disappointed but having had time to reflect on it, I thought it was genius. We couldn’t have the perfect happy ever after; it wouldn’t have fit in with the style of the book. Neither could we have Grace’s downfall, so what we did get was just perfect. A frustrating but fitting ending.There were many shocks and surprises throughout the book, and I constantly felt drawn back to it while reading. Overall, a fantastic read and is most definitely a five-star read.