How to Kill Your Family: A Novel

Amazon.com Review\nAn Amazon Best Book of August 2022: As titles go, you’d be hard pressed to find one as provocative, or apt, as How to Kill Your Family. Grace is sitting in a prison cell, recounting why she killed her family (her dad, a rich heir, refused the wishes of her poor dying mum to get involved in Grace’s life) and listing the much more entertaining hows (locations including, but not limited to, a steam room in Monaco, a mountain road in Marbella, and a sex club in London’s East End). But the standout moments in this darkly hilarious novel are those spent inside Grace’s head as she moves with deadly and detached efficiency through her to-do (or, more accurately, to-kill) list of awful family members. Her running commentary (on everything from prep work for killing someone, the class divide, unsolicited penis pics, wearing cords, and influencers) is sharp as a tack and spit-out-your-coffee comical. This twisted, darkly funny thriller will fill the Dexter-shaped hole in your heart. —Vannessa Cronin, Amazon Editor\nA darkly humorous debut novel that follows a cunning antihero as she gets her revenge\nWhen 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.\nWhen Grace Bernard discovers her absentee millionaire father has rejected her dying mother’s pleas for help, she vows revenge and coldly sets out to get her retribution—by killing them all, one by one. Compulsively readable, Bella Mackie’s debut novel is driven by a captivating first-person narrator who talks of “self-care” and social media while calmly walking the reader through her increasingly baroque acts of murder. But then, Grace is imprisoned for a murder she didn’t commit.\nOutrageously funny, compulsive, and subversive, How to Kill Your Family is a wickedly dark romp about class, family, love . . . and murder.