Although her feelings could be understandable, and could have been written in such a way as to allow for her character to grow, there was a distinct sense that we should be agreeing with her full stop even when she is spewing hate for no discernible reason.

How To Kill Your Family was described in the publisher’s blurb as “a wickedly dark romp about class, family, love” and “outrageously funny, compulsive and subversive. I never fully comprehended Grace’s motives for adding ‘eliminate my entire family’ to her to-do list, nor did I grasp the full extent of the impact her father’s abandonment had on her or her mother, but feeling that I now know her intimately as a character, I can understand how she undertook and carried out such a task.

She’s very funny (it’s black humour of course) and I confess to liking her wry dark style and admiring her superb put down lines and wish I’d thought of them! To be clear, I read to escape, and don’t want to see ANY political jabs from either side of aisle, even if their beliefs align with my own. There were a few funny scenes here and there, but they were sadly not enough to carry the whole book. This niggle and a certain twist at the end put my nose out of joint, though kudos to Mackie for pulling off something so unexpected. Assassins and spy novels are cool to read and all, but I don’t feel you always get the ‘why’ apart from ‘the character is broken and thats why they chose this job’.

Now she's in jail for something she hasn't done and, the icing on the cake, she left evidence of what nobody else knows has happened. This was a fabulously fun crime read, I just could not help liking Grace, my only gripe was with the final twists which come out of the blue and not how I would preferred to see the book end. This immediately loses any sense of suspense at what is to follow, as you know that she will be talking about seven murders, one of which she didn't do and six that she did. Given all the hoopla surrounding Bella Mackie’s novel, I was surprised how overwhelming tedious it turned out to be.

Not sure how often she had to mention white privilege and harp on about things she hates, came across as judgemental in the extreme. and each setting is really well written and evokes the relevant atmosphere, be that the Costa del Sol / marshlands / Monaco / seedy sex clubs – it’s nothing if not varied.

and the juicy details of her life along with the creative offing of six members of her family, she had me laughing out loud. It is so refreshing and honestly, I didn’t think that I’d ever be rooting for a serial killer, but somehow, Mackie makes Grace likeable.How to Kill Your Family’ is less alarming than it sounds, but it’s still a darkly comic first-person narrative from the point of view of a young woman named Grace Bernard, who’s in prison for a crime she didn’t commit. I’ve read a few books over the summer, although admittedly my reading (and therefore reviewing) always tends to slow down around this time of year as I’m so busy doing lots of other fabulous things.

Okay, this is going under a spoiler tag, but yeah, apparently her secret half brother had been following her all along, and she never noticed because she's an idiot. If you liked Dexter, and/or the humor of Joe in You, or Paul in Best Day Ever, then you will love Grace.

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. 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.