‘How To Kill Your Family‘ is a clever reboot of the Ealing comedy ‘Kind Hearts And Coronets‘ with a wicked sense of humour, lots of twenty-first-century trappings and in-jokes (including having our homicidal heroine reading ‘Israel Rank‘, the book ‘Kind Hearts And Coronets’ was based on) and a truly devilish twist to liven things up. 

It’s a fun piece if your sense of humour runs towards the snarky and dark, which mine does. I enjoyed the constant flow of sneering observations of the vacuous vulgarity of the nouveau riche, even though they mostly served tactically to reinforce the taste of members of the long-established upper class.

I found that I shared and enjoyed reading about a great many of the misanthropic assessments made by the serial killer heroine. It made me think that it’s a good job that I haven’t been given a reason to wreak bloody revenge on anyone.

One of the problems I had with the book was that I didn’t think that Grace Bernard, our heroine, had enough of a reason to focus her whole life on revenging herself by killing off all the members of her estranged family. Yes, she’d made a vow as a young teenager to revenge the harm she thought her family had done to her mother but I found it hard to believe that she’d still be following that plan more than a decade later.

For most of the book, Grace struck me as naive and emotionally stunted. She didn’t plan well. She took no real joy in what she was doing. She was good at making snarky comments and observing people’s weaknesses. She could make herself angry enough to commit to violence when it was needed but she seemed largely unaware of the risks that she was taking. The combination of this lack of awareness and her reliance on improvisation and luck over planning and preparation took a lot of the tension out of the various killings that she committed.

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.

The ending made up for all that. I didn’t see it coming but it wasn’t some slight of hand trick that tested my ability to suspend disbelief, rather it was like a perfectly executed magic trick that had had me looking in all the wrong places. It was a wonderful twist that not only worked but was deeply satisfying and fiendishly clever.

I listened to the audiobook version of ‘How To Kill Your Family‘. It worked well enough but I found the delivery of the main narrator very flat at the beginning. I got used to it and I can see that it was an interpretation of Grace’s character but I was irritated by the way the narration ignored the rhythm of the text and sometimes buried punchlines. The second narrator was pitch-perfect.

Click on the SoundCloud link below to hear a sample of the narration.

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