Some thrillers grip you with pace. This one grips you with people — and then pulls the floor out from under them.
What it’s about (no spoilers)
Jen Miller leaves her youngest child in the care of her two sisters while the family gathers at superstar Winter Kellaway’s beachside estate for a wedding celebration. The champagne is on ice, the decorations are flawless — and one split-second lapse turns the happiest day of the year into a tragedy the family will never recover from. What follows is grief, blame, an explosive court case, and a long-buried secret that refuses to stay buried. DC Saul Anguish is brought in to investigate.
What I loved
The twists. Plural. Every time I thought I had it worked out, Cummins shifted the ground and I was wrong again — and not in a cheap, out-of-nowhere way. The clues are there; you just don’t see them until she wants you to.
The sisters are the real engine of the book. Winter, Jen and Alyssa are so believably written that the fallout hurts, and the shifting timelines and viewpoints mean you’re constantly re-weighing who deserves your sympathy. That’s the clever bit: your loyalties keep moving.
It’s also genuinely emotional. This isn’t just a puzzle to solve — it’s about guilt, forgiveness and how far people will go to protect the ones they love. I read most of it in two sittings because I simply couldn’t leave it alone.
What didn’t quite work
My one real gripe is the subplot involving Saul. I never felt it earned its place. Every time the story cut back to him I found myself wanting to get back to the sisters, and I don’t think losing those sections would have cost the book anything — if anything the central story would have hit even harder. It’s not badly written, it just sits slightly apart from everything that makes the novel so compelling. Half a star off for that.
The verdict
A dark, twisty, surprisingly moving thriller with characters you’ll be arguing about long after the last page. If you like Lisa Jewell or Claire Douglas, or you enjoy a courtroom thread running through your crime fiction, you’ll fly through this one. It was also shortlisted for the CWA Twisted Dagger 2026.
How to Kill Your Family is a razor‑sharp, darkly comic revenge novel that follows Grace Bernard, a woman systematically eliminating her estranged billionaire family while narrating her story from a prison cell. It’s brilliantly written, deeply cynical, very funny in a vicious way, and capped with a twist that lingers long after you close the book.
Overview and Rating I’m giving How to Kill Your Family a 4.75 out of 5 because it delivers exactly what it promises: a viciously entertaining, morally queasy, and stylishly written story that keeps you hooked from the opening line to the final twist.
Plot Summary (Spoiler‑Aware) Grace Bernard opens the book from her cell in an all‑women’s prison, calmly explaining that she is serving time for a murder she didn’t commit—despite the fact she has successfully killed six people. With cool detachment and biting humour, she decides to use her prison time to write down exactly how she did it, and why. Grace is the illegitimate daughter of Simon Artemis, a phenomenally wealthy, image‑obsessed businessman who refused to acknowledge her and left her and her mother in poverty. After her mother dies young, worn down by illness and financial strain, Grace learns the truth about her father’s identity and channels her grief into a meticulous plan: she will annihilate the entire Artemis clan, one family member at a time, and only then will she come for Simon himself. The novel moves back and forth between Grace’s present in prison and her past as she hunts down her targets: privileged siblings, smug relatives, and hangers‑on who orbit the Artemis money. Each murder is tailored to its victim—sometimes staged as an accident, sometimes as a crime of passion, always executed with unnerving precision and a deadpan running commentary on modern life, wealth, and hypocrisy. While Grace is cool and methodical, the narrative is laced with caustic observations about influencer culture, performative charity, “good” rich people branding, and the absurdities of modern London society. The tension comes not just from whether Grace will succeed in her revenge, but from the irony that she ends up imprisoned for the one killing she didn’t commit, even as her real crimes go undetected.
The final act delivers a twist that reframes Grace’s swaggering control and forces you to reconsider just how secure she ever really was. The ending feels deliberately unsettling, underscoring the book’s interest in moral ambiguity, unfair systems, and the gap between who tells the story and who actually wins.
Tone, Style, and Dark Humour
This is very much a character‑driven, voice‑led novel; if you enjoy a strong, sardonic narrator, Grace is going to hook you from the start. She’s not “likeable” in a conventional sense—she’s judgmental, ruthless, and often cruel—but her commentary on class, privilege, and performative morality is so sharp that you may find yourself unwillingly on her side. The humour is jet‑black: you’re laughing at funeral mishaps, social media absurdities, and the ridiculousness of the wealthy, often in the same paragraph as a cold‑blooded killing. Mackie balances this with a slow‑burn pacing that focuses less on constant thriller beats and more on the psychology of resentment, entitlement, and what years of quiet fury can do to a person. Characters and Themes Grace herself is the main event: an anti‑heroine who sees murder as logical, even tidy, justice for the neglect and cruelty she and her mother endured. Her voice is full of contradictions—self‑aware yet blinkered, funny yet chilling, morally lucid about everyone else while blind to her own monstrosity—which makes her compelling even when she’s appalling.
The Artemis family function as a gallery of modern, media‑friendly aristocrats and new‑money caricatures: influencers, philanthropists, social climbers, and corporate saints whose public ethics mask deep selfishness and vanity. Through them, the book skewers class inequality, inherited wealth, PR‑polished compassion, and the idea that a good public image can erase harm. Running beneath the satire is a very human story about loss, abandonment, and what happens when grief calcifies into rage instead of healing. Grace’s trajectory asks where the line sits between personal responsibility and structural injustice: is she a monster shaped by systems, or someone who actively chooses monstrosity and dresses it up as justice?
The Twist and Ending (No Detailed Spoilers)
Without spelling out the final reveal, the twist undercuts the fantasy of total control that Grace has been selling you all along. It highlights how fragile her carefully constructed narrative always was and reinforces the book’s interest in power, luck, and who ultimately gets to walk away clean. Some readers will find the ending abrupt or even infuriating, especially if they’re expecting conventional thriller closure. For me, it felt like a gutsy choice that keeps the story lodged in an uncomfortable, morally murky space rather than tying things up with a bow—fitting for a book this dark and sardonic. Who This Book Is For You’ll likely love How to Kill Your Family if you enjoy: • Darkly comic crime or psychological fiction with a morally grey narrator • Social satire that skewers the super‑rich, influencer culture, and performative “goodness” • Slow‑burn narratives focused on character voice rather than wall‑to‑wall action It may not be for you if you need a traditionally satisfying, neatly resolved ending, or if you prefer crime novels where you root for the detective instead of the murderer.
I’d happily give The Whole Truth by Cara Hunter a solid 4.5 out of 5 – one of those crime novels you fly through without even noticing the time. It’s easy to read, engaging from the first chapter, and, most importantly, it feels believable all the way through.
What it’s about The Whole Truth is a twisty, fast‑paced crime novel set in Oxford, following DI Adam Fawley and his team as they investigate a sexual assault allegation between a student and a professor. The usual dynamic is flipped: the professor is a female academic, and the student is a male rugby player, which instantly makes the story feel fresh and slightly uncomfortable in all the right ways. At the same time, Fawley is dealing with the fallout from an old case, where a convicted rapist he helped put away has been released and may be out for revenge. That threat brings Fawley’s personal life crashing into his professional world and keeps the tension simmering in the background. Why it’s so engaging This is an incredibly easy book to read. The chapters are short, the pacing is snappy, and it has that “just one more chapter” feel that keeps you turning pages long past when you meant to stop. The mix of traditional narrative with things like messages, media snippets and other modern touches keeps it feeling current and lively. The plot is full of red herrings and “wait, what?” moments, but it never slips into the unbelievable. It stays grounded enough that you can actually imagine a case like this unfolding in real life, which makes it even more compelling. Characters and believability The characters feel nicely rounded rather than just “police procedural cardboard cut‑outs”. Fawley and his team have real‑life worries, messy home situations and proper personalities, which makes you care about more than just solving the case. The investigation itself – the interviews, evidence, and internal politics – feels realistic while still delivering plenty of drama. Even when the story throws in a twist, it fits the clues you’ve already been given. By the end, the pieces slot together in a satisfying way, so you don’t feel cheated by a random reveal.
The book it never lost me and it never dragged. Overall, The Whole Truth is an addictive, highly readable crime novel that kept me guessing almost until the final pages.
