None of these idiots are thinking about climate change, they’re wondering what to wear on the yacht tomorrow. I’m more than 50% through my Goodreads goal for this year (you can follow me there too if you have Goodreads, same name as the blog), so I’m a little behind, but I expect to get caught up across the Autumn and Winter months with more time spent indoors! We don't see too many dominant side characters in this book, only her friend Jimmy who has stuck by her during the bad times (he isn't aware of her family-esque murdering spree).

If you’d like to read something a little darker, but something which brings humour too, I wholeheartedly recommend this book. It actually has more in common with The Thursday Murder Club than it has with Sixteen Horses – a very dark book I read recently. Usually for me, when I take a dislike to one of the main characters, I feel like it's a slog to read through the rest of the book. After discovering this, Grace vows revenge and decides to kill every member of her father’s family, leaving him for last. You don't often expect to find humour within a novel about murder yet Bella Mackie has successfully woven comedy throughout the book.The driving force of the plot – Grace’s mad plan to kill her family and become rich – isn’t realistic, it’s a dark comedy that will make you laugh and nod your head in recognition at the power structures at play. She’s cold, calculating, manipulative and an absolute sociopath who feels absolutely nothing and seriously has lost all effort to care about anyone but herself and her mission. This was author Bella Mackie's debut fiction book and I look forward to listening to this author's future titles. Overall, this compelling tale of calculated revenge was fast-paced, witty, and riveting, from beginning to end.

I can’t help liking her and I know I shouldn’t as she’s done some truly awful things to some truly awful people. A caveat: there is a political jab made early in the book, so I set it aside, but the positive reviews of Goodreads friends (Ceecee, Michael, and Jayne) led me to pick it up again. Vital to the success of any hunter-dealer is an ability to negotiate with the dragons who invariably guard sought-after treasures. Mackie is undeniably privileged, which makes her constant digs at privileged white people a tad ironic and eye-rolling inducing.Readers have a front-row seat as Grace picks off the family one by one – and the result is as gruesome as it is entertaining in this wickedly dark romp about class, family, love… and murder. It follows her life story as she sat in a prison cell relaying the murders she planned out and achieved, whilst being incarcerated for a crime she So Grace has benefited from a similar privileged life that she criticises other people for enjoying.

By the end of the book, I understood that portraying Grace this way was intentional and that the most interesting parts of the plot depended on it but somewhere around the halfway mark I’d started to run out of patience with her. Maybe it isn’t perfect, but living out has been a staple of Oxford student life for decades, and it’s one of the only similarities it has to the typical student experience at any other university. I highly recommend it if you’re looking for an original and sometimes outrageously entertaining story, but be advised this is definitely an ‘R’-rated read. Yet, in a strange twist of fate, she is convicted and sent to prison for the one murder she DIDN’T commit.She is quite proud of the fact that she got away with it-so when she ends up in jail, accused of a murder she didn’t commit-she decides to brag about the ones she is guilty of committing-by writing about them in a journal that she hopes someone will find locked in a safe, one day after she is dead and buried. 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.