[READ: June, 2022] How to Kill Your Family
This looked like the perfect book to read over Fathers Day weekend.
But it’s not an instruction manual for the average person. No indeed, the reason Grace Bernard is planning to kill her family is twofold
Her mother died when she was young. She learned while she was growing up that her biological father Simon wanted nothing to do with her (or her mother). He promised them the world, because he pretty much owned the world. He was part of a very wealthy family who bought and sold companies on a whim. He was also very publicly (un)happily married with a child and this affair with Grace’s mother could not go public.
As the book opens, Grace is in Limehouse prison. Ironically, even though she has already killed people, she is in prison for a murder that she did not actually commit–and had no intention of committing.
Grace is surprisingly, hilariously, above everyone else. Her cellmate Kelly is pretty trashy. She runs scams online. She frequently gets caught, but she’s right back out there to do it again. She drives Grace crazy. And Grace looks down on Kelly and everyone like her–there’s some really funny lines of abject dismissal in the book:
She’s attractive, is Kelly. Big pouty lips, which I suspect are the result of cheap filler but look all right from a distance, and lots of red hair. Sadly, her limited intelligence means she was easy to find when a man finally plucked up the courage to stop sending her money and contacted the police. She’d had the money sent to her boyfriend’s account, the stupid cow, and has wound up doing an eighteen month stretch as a result. Not an elegant crime, I warrant you, but I have no sympathy for her victims either. If you are delusional enough to believe that anyone wants to see a grainy iPhone picture of your flaccid little friend, you deserve to get bled for it.