Not all hens went to the party to have a good time.
Lauren, Saskia, Dominica, Farah and Tansy have been friends since nursery. They wonder if that was the last time they all actually liked each other.
Reunited as bridesmaids at Tansy’s spiritual hen party in the woods, it doesn’t take long before old grudges begin to surface. Not to mention the secret they’ve been hiding for twenty years.
But what starts as a weekend of macramé and penis straws ends in murder when Tansy chokes to death on a poisoned cacao.
And as the body count keeps climbing, the friends realise that one of their group must be the killer – and they need to watch their backs.

‘You May Now Kill The Bride‘ sounded like it might be light and funny in a see-how-absurb-we-are? way. It turned out to be a vivisection of Hen Dos and dysfunctional friendships, with a steadily rising bodycount as the relationships spiraled from fraught to fatal.

I admired the quality of the writing and Kate Weston’s bitingly accurate observation of people trapped in the rotting corpse of a dead relationship sustained purely by a collective consensual delusion.

Admiring a book isn’t the same as enjoying it. The book did make me laugh at times. At other times, just being in the company of these woman made me feel oppressed. The solution to the murders might have had me going: ‘Really! You expect me to buy that?” except, by the time the big reveal came, nothing any of these women did to themselves or each other surprised me any more.

‘You May Now Kill The Bride‘ was a clever book populated with believably unpleasant people who, when they come together, amplified each others faults. It was full of situations and behaviours that felt completley believable while at the same time beig outrageously unpleasant. The mystery had just enough pull to keep me reading and just enough twists to prevent me from guessing who the murderer was. The killings weren’t really the main event. The vortex at the centre of all this misery was the relationship between these thirty-something women who had known one anothe since childhood.

The book was a journey into dark dysfunction, punctuated by a series of celebrations that felt more like punishments.

The start of the book perfectly captured the fragile fiction of hen do celebrations, portraying them as a brittle icing smoothing over the imperfections of real life. To me, it seemed very English and very contemporary. I loved the way the humour balanced on a knife edge seperating sarcasm from amused sympathy.

Kate Weston quickly dug into the emotional cake beneath the icing of hen do rituals by introducing present-day threats taking and by reaching back to when these women were girls were at school together, making it clear that they share prison-worthy secrets.

We hit the first killing shockingly early in the book and the story became something more serious and more sinister than a comedy of manners. From the reactions to the killing, I understood that the friendships that I thought had become husks held together by habit were actually shored up by shared shame.

The story is told from multiple points of view. This is done with discipline and skill. I thought that moving from person to person might bring moments of relief but I didn’t really want to be inside the heads of any of these women. It’s not that they were monstrous, it just that they were habitually unkind, selfish and unsupportive. The atmosphere between them was venomous. These women were toxic, especially when they were together. The jealousies, grudges, frustrations and betrayals were described with cringe-worthy accuracy. I could easily see any of them becoming fantasy murder target and I had no idea who was their fantasy a reality.

‘You May Now Kill The Bride‘ made me want to found a Hen Do Abuse support group. Certainly, it’s a ritual that wasn’t making any of the women in the story happy. It seemed to me that Kate Weston offered the Hen Do rituals as examples of how the pressure to appear to be living an Insta Story perfect life distorts people’s perceptions of themselves and their friends and lacquers their interactions in a layer of this-is-what’s-expected falsity that suffocated them.

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