How to Kill Your Family

A friend pressed this one on me after I complained that most revenge stories feel too tidy. She said this one is messy in the right way, funny in a way that makes you uncomfortable, and built around a narrator you root for even when you should probably call someone. She was right on all three counts. Bella Mackie published How to Kill Your Family with The Borough Press in 2021 as a 355 page hardcover, her first novel after the memoir Jog On, and it went on to top the Sunday Times paperback chart. I read it across four nights, with the last hundred pages going fast because I needed to see how Mackie would land a story that paints itself into a corner on purpose.

Grace Bernard is the reason the book works. She is twenty eight when she tells her story, clever and watchful, funny about clothes and flats and men and office politics, and completely open about the fact that she has killed six members of her own family. That is the first thing she tells you. She does not whisper it. She lays it out the way other people lay out a CV, then walks you back to the start so you can see how a girl with a normal life and a sharp tongue talked herself into murder as a project. I believed her voice at once, which worried me a little, because she is telling you about killing people and you keep turning pages instead of putting the book down.

She grew up without money in London with her mum, sharing a small flat and a small circle. School was fine. Jobs were patchy. She learned to read rooms early, to notice who gets helped and who gets ignored. Mackie gives her a dry way of looking at rich rooms, the kind of detail where Grace clocks the handbags and the schooling and the easy confidence before anyone has said a word. That eye matters later, because the whole plot runs on Grace studying people until she knows their routines better than they do.

The father who never showed up

Simon Artemis made his money in retail and property and then made himself into a public figure, the kind of man whose face turns up in business pages and charity photos. He is married, with a large legitimate family around him, and he lives at a distance from Grace in every sense. Grace is the result of an affair he says he cannot recall, which is a neat trick for a man who remembers every contract he ever signed. When Grace was a child he was a name her mother spoke with a mix of anger and care. When Grace was older he became a door she knocked on and found closed.

Mackie keeps him off the page for a long stretch, which is smart. You hear about him through what he did not do. He did not answer letters. He did not send money when it would have changed things. He did not make room for a daughter who shared his blood and his stubborn streak. People around him protect him without being asked. Assistants filter. His wife looks the other way. His other children have no idea Grace exists, and that ignorance cuts deepest. His absence was comfortable for everyone except her and her mum.

I kept waiting for a scene where he explains himself and makes it better or worse. Mackie does not give you that release. Simon stays sleek and remote, a man who built a story about himself and refuses to edit it. That choice keeps the anger clean. Grace is not fighting a man who wronged her once in a dramatic way. She is fighting a man who decided, day after day, that she was easier to forget. By the time she starts planning, you understand why apologies would not fix it. There is nothing to forgive in one sitting, because the slight was spread across years.

What makes Simon useful as a villain is that he is ordinary in his selfishness. He donates to the right causes. He says the right things about family in interviews. He loves his recognized children in the visible way rich fathers do, with schools and holidays and introductions. Grace watches all of it from outside. The contrast between his public warmth and his private coldness is what turns her grief into something harder. She stops wanting his love and starts wanting his address book, his habits, his weak points.

Mum and the months that broke everything

Grace adored her mum, and that love is the softest part of the book. They were a team of two. Her mum worked hard, kept the flat going, made jokes when money was tight, and tried to shield Grace from how much she minded being left out of Simon's world. When her mum got sick, the smallness of their life became dangerous. Treatment costs, time off work, the kind of help that friends can give for a week but not for a year. Grace was young and scared and trying to hold a job while caring for the only person who had ever fully shown up for her.

She wrote to Simon. Her mum, who had pride, allowed it because she was dying and wanted Grace to have something after. The reply, when it came, was cold and final. No help, no visit, no acknowledgment that would have mattered. Mackie does not stage this as a big courtroom speech. It arrives as paperwork and silence, which feels true. Rich men do not always slam doors. Sometimes they let other people close them quietly.

Her mum died. Grace was left with grief and rent and a job that did not pay enough and a flat full of things that still smelled like the person who was gone. I found these chapters the most affecting in the book, because Grace is not yet a killer here. She is a daughter trying to sort clothes for charity while crying in a way that surprises her. She keeps thinking about what a small amount of money would have meant at the right moment, and how Simon spent more on lunches than her mum needed for a month of care. That math curdles into a plan.

It would be easy to paint this as sudden madness. Mackie does the opposite. Grace grieves, goes back to work, dates badly, drinks with friends, and slowly settles on a thought she first treats as a joke. If Simon's family disappeared, she would inherit. If she removed them carefully, one at a time, nobody would connect a poor girl from a council estate to a string of rich accidents. The thought stays too long and becomes a list. The list becomes research. Research becomes travel and watching and waiting. Grief does not excuse what follows, and Grace never asks you to excuse it. She asks you to follow how it happened, step by step, until murder feels like admin.

The list and the slow work of getting close

Grace decides to kill six people. Her father sits at the center of it, but she starts with the edges, the relatives whose deaths will look natural or unlucky if handled right. She studies timetables, health problems, hobbies, houses, staff, dogs, gates, alarms. She learns who swims alone in the morning, who likes risky games, who posts every meal and run online, who trusts new friends too fast. The pleasure of this middle stretch is watching someone with no training get good at a terrible craft through patience.

One cousin, Bryony, lives half her life on social media as an influencer, and Grace uses that openness against her. If you post your runs, your holidays, your favorite spots, you hand a stranger your schedule. Grace watches, likes, comments, becomes a familiar name, then a familiar face. Another relative has a weakness for control games and private parties, and Grace learns the scene well enough to blend in. An older woman with a heart condition loves her sauna and trusts the tech in her expensive house, which gives Grace an opening she exploits with chilling calm. Mackie varies the methods so no two deaths feel the same. One looks like misadventure on a trip. One looks like a medical event at home. One looks like a private act between adults that went too far.

Getting close to Simon himself takes the longest. Grace cannot walk up to his house and introduce herself as his daughter without setting off alarms. So she finds a way into his orbit through work and social edges, taking a job that puts her near the family, learning names of assistants and drivers, remembering birthdays, being useful and forgettable at once. She is good at this because she spent years being overlooked and learned how to use it. People tell her things because she seems harmless. She asks follow up questions because she seems keen. She writes it all down later with a clerk like satisfaction.

The class satire bites hardest here. Grace moves through parties and country houses and members clubs where everyone assumes she belongs to the staff or is someone's plus one, and she lets them assume it while she memorizes the layout. Mackie is sharp on the small snobberies, who gets introduced properly, who gets asked what they do with real interest, who gets talked over. Grace notices every cut and files it. Some readers may find these passages broad. I thought the broadness was the point. Grace sees rich life as a performance, so she describes it as one, with costumes and lines and bad acting.

There were moments I had to put the book down and stare at the wall, not because the violence is graphic on every page but because Grace is so matter of fact about it. She worries about parking, about phone signal, about whether her shoes will be remembered, the way the rest of us worry about bringing the right dish to dinner. That flat tone is the book's engine. It makes murder feel like errands, which is disturbing, and it makes you laugh at lines you wish you had not laughed at, which is the trap Mackie sets.

Limehouse, a notebook, and telling it straight

All of this reaches you from a cell in Limehouse Prison, where Grace is writing her account while waiting on lawyers and living on routine. The present tense chapters are short and dry. Wake up, noise, bad food, small kindnesses from staff, wariness of other prisoners, the long empty afternoons. Grace keeps her head down. She writes at a table when she can. She thinks about how her story sounds now that it is finished, and whether anyone will ever read the full version.

The prison frame does a lot of work. It explains why Grace can narrate with hindsight, why she jumps in time, why she sometimes pauses to tell you what she got wrong. It also creates a gap between what she did and what she is charged with, which is the hook Mackie uses to pull you through the middle. Grace insists she sits in jail for a killing she did not do, while the killings she did carry out went unnoticed. You read the past murders with that claim hanging over you, checking each one for the mistake that might have put her here, or for proof that the system only sees what it wants to see.

Her solicitor visits bring the only plot movement in the present for long stretches. He is professional and cautious, the kind of man who chooses words like they cost money. He updates her on appeals and paperwork and what not to put in writing, which is rich given what she is writing. Grace likes him without trusting him completely. She also leans on a friend outside who sends money and news and keeps her connected to a life that feels very far away. Those small exchanges, a parcel, a message passed on, a visit that lifts a week, humanize Grace more than any speech about motives.

I liked how Mackie handles time in these chapters. Past and present do not alternate on a strict pattern. Sometimes you get three long past chapters in a row because a murder needs room. Sometimes you get a brief present chapter that is only a paragraph about sleep or food or a rumor on the wing. That looseness keeps the book from feeling like a laundry list of deaths. It also lets Grace comment on her younger self with a mix of pride and irritation. She thinks she was clever. She also thinks she was naive about what killing would fix, which is as close as she gets to regret.

The turns at the end and what I would argue with

Without giving away the exact mechanics, the last third reframes what you thought you knew. One death you assumed was clean turns out to have loose ends. One person you filed as minor turns out to matter more. The charge that put Grace in Limehouse gets explained in full, and the explanation is both satisfying and sour, because it shows how justice can miss the real crimes while punishing the wrong one. There is also a final reveal about family and inheritance that forces you to reread Grace's motives in a harsher light. Mackie plays fair with clues. If you go back, the signs were there in throwaway remarks about timing and about who knew what when.

I admired the nerve of the ending even where I questioned it. Grace remains unrepentant in a way that will annoy readers who want growth or punishment to feel moral. She learns how the world works without deciding to be better. Some deaths rely on luck and on victims behaving exactly as Grace needs them to, and at least one plan depends on tech and timing lining up perfectly. If you read thrillers for airtight procedure, you will spot the joins. I spotted them and kept going because the voice carried me, but I noted them in the margin with a frown.

My other pushback is about the middle. The book runs long in the stretch where Grace infiltrates and waits. Watching and researching is the point, but three similar sequences of befriend, learn routine, strike, cover up start to blur even with different methods. Bryony's story holds because the influencer detail feels specific and current. The sauna plot holds because the domestic tech angle is creepy in a way that lingers. One of the male relatives, though, never quite becomes a person before he becomes a target, so his chapter feels like a step on a checklist rather than a loss, which may be intentional but left me cold in the wrong way.

The satire can also be blunt. Rich people are vain, careless, fond of wellness language, quick to post, slow to notice staff. All true enough as comedy, and Mackie lands jokes about self care talk and brand deals that made me snort. After a while, though, the targets feel preselected. Grace mocks the rich for performing virtue while she performs innocence to kill them, and the book knows this mirror is there, but it does not press on it as hard as it could. A sharper edit might have let one victim surprise Grace by being kind in a way she could not dismiss, which would have tested her story about deserving. As written, most victims confirm her view, which makes her job easier and the moral question a touch too comfortable.

Who should read it. If you like comic crime with a strong voice, stories where a woman underestimated by everyone uses that blind spot, or books about class that are angry without being dour, start here. If you need a detective to admire, a trial that rights wrongs, or murders that feel fully investigated on the page, this will frustrate you. There is no brilliant inspector laying out photos. There is Grace, telling you she got away with it and daring you to keep liking her. That dare is the whole entertainment.

I closed the book thinking less about the murders than about the flat after her mum died, the charity bags and the rent and the unanswered letters. Mackie buries the emotional truth early and then covers it with jokes and planning and blood, but it is still there at the end when the noise fades. Grace wanted a father to act like one when it counted. He did not. Everything after is what she built out of that no. It is clever, it is awful, and it is hard to stop reading once she starts explaining how she did it.

For readers meeting Mackie first

Start here if Mackie is new to you. This is the novel that made her name in fiction, and her later book What A Way To Go stays with rich families and bad behavior in a fresh setup. Each stands alone, so no prep is needed.

Give Grace fifty pages before you judge her. The early humor feels sharp for its own sake until her mum's illness enters and the plan gains weight. Watch who benefits from each death as you go. The closing reveal hits harder when you track who is left.