Book review of ‘How to Kill your Family’ by Bella Mackie

I’ve been lucky enough to read some really gripping crime novels this year, and ‘How to Kill your Family’ is another great read. In this darkly sarcastic novel, the serial killer tells you all about their inventive killing spree as though you’re their best friend, and their chatty narrative makes you forget that there’s anything wrong with what the anti-hero is doing at times. There is a huge amount of black humour, and the protagonist is wickedly persuasive in her justification of her evil deeds to the extent that you do find yourself championing her cause in places.

There’s a big twist at the end which I’m not convinced that I liked as much as the rest of the novel, but it was needed to prevent a very predictable ending. This is a new type of crime thriller and the cheeky little narrator is a refreshing voice for the genre. I think that this will charm readers of YA and crime alike.

I have killed several people (some brutally, others calmly) and yet I currently languish in jail for a murder I did not commit.

When I think about what I actually did, I feel somewhat sad that nobody will ever know about the complex operation that I undertook. Getting away with it is highly preferable, of course, but perhaps when I’m long gone, someone will open an old safe and find this confession. The public would reel.

After all, almost nobody else in the world can possibly understand how someone, by the tender age of 28, can have calmly killed six members of her family. And then happily got on with the rest of her life, never to regret a thing.