Saffy Huntley-Oliver has a secret. A secret that she is deeply ashamed of. It’s not the fact that she’s a serial killer in her free time. In fact, she’s quite proud of that. After all she’s only killing the bad men. She is making the world a better place.
No, her secret is far worse than that. Saffy has a messy, inexplicable, uncontrollable crush. So while she’s busy plotting her next murder, she also has the much harder task of figuring out how to get a boyfriend. 
But if there’s one thing Saffy knows, it’s how to get her man . . .

I devoured Bad Men in two days and enjoyed every minute of it. It was fresh, energetic, funny, dark, violent and clever. 

It has severed heads, multiple serial killers, multiple bad men who, for once, get what they deserve, a cute dog in great peril and two engaging main characters: Saffy, smart, beautiful, single and wealthy, who killed her first bad man when she was twelve and now hunts and murders them as a hobby and Jonathan, a true-crime podcaster whose obsession with murder has destroyed his marriage and is about to put his life in danger. 

I won’t go into the details of the plot because that would spoil the fun but I will say that it has so many twists that even when I reached the epilogue my ideas of what had been going on and who had made it happen and why continued to be reset. 

Bad Men is a wonderful mix of violent thriller and RomCom which gleefully twists the conventions of both genres to do surprising things, many of which involve attacking the patriarchy with wit and sharp blades.

This book made me laugh and it kept me guessing. Saffy is a killer who may or may not be a sociopath yet I found myself cheering her on in her endeavours both to win Jonathan’s affections and to rid the world of some despicable men. 

I recommend the audiobook version, narrated by Nathalie Buscombe

If you’d like to hear how Julie Mae Cohen came to write Bad Men, listen to her interview with Zoe Ball on the BBC Radio 2 Book Club (you will have to sign in to BBC Sounds)

Bad Men will be released in the United States in hardcover, ebook and audiobook on 7 May 2024 by Abrams Overlook: