Bella Mackie, author of How to Kill Your Family, is back with another deliciously titled tale of murder, What a Way to Go (The Borough Press). This begins at the 60th birthday party of the impossibly rich Anthony Wistern: “Fragrant wife, tick. Gaggle of photogenic children, French chateau, Cotswold manor, a plethora of mistresses and a penchant for cutting moral corners, tick, tick, tick.” Unfortunately for Anthony he’s soon discovered skewered on a huge metal spike in a lake in his grounds. Police – and a local true-crime obsessive – investigate his death, with each of his four grasping children and his wife, Olivia, all under suspicion.
Mackie has assembled a gloriously repugnant cast – everyone here, apart from her rather sweet TikTok sleuth, is dreadful, but in a pleasurably awful way. Olivia, in particular, is brilliantly drawn: “I’ve never been one to obsess over my children like other women – your offspring don’t constitute a personality after all,” she says, and: “Last night, when I saw her eccentric drop-waisted tartan dress, I’d wondered how it was possible we had maintained our decades-long friendship.”
