Bella Mackie
How to Kill Your Family
Ahah, if you read my post last week, I guess you’ll have been wondering when this topic might appear – How to Kill Your Family. 
This debut novel by Bella Mackie was written during the pandemic and published last year, quickly becoming a Sunday Times bestseller. Given the reaction of the lovely waitress at Shugborough Manor, I felt somewhat compelled to get on and read the book, to assure her/readers that it was indeed part of my writerly research, not signifying any evil intent on my part!
It’s a tale that takes us inside the mind of an unusual psychopath, one who is possessed and intoxicated by her need/desire to wipe out a complete family. The young killer in this case believes that there’s a certain art to a good murder. She’s not into bloodshed and savage violence; rather she’s fascinated by the motives and habits of her potential victims, and wants their own extravagant lifestyles to be the cause of their undoing. To that end her research is meticulous. She studies the minutiae of the lives and appetites of each of her victims to find a way of killing that happens while they are going about their ordinary everyday activities doing something perfectly normal for them. And, of course, that way credibility is given to a verdict of ‘accidental death’.
Grace Barnard was born of a short unbalanced relationship between an impecunious but effortlessly-beautiful French girl, Marie, and a wealthy entitled already-married man, Simon Artemis, 22 years her senior, one of the richest men in the world, who rejected Marie and her baby both at the pregnancy stage and when Marie appealed to him just before her own untimely premature death.
From the age of 13 Grace has planned a way to avenge her mother: she would rid the world of this morally rotten family, the embodiment of toxic capitalism, a vacuum of morality, a totem of greed. And she had absolutely no qualms about doing so. After all, it wouldn’t be taking anything decent away, would it? Indeed it would be for the public good.
By the time we meet her, she has calmly and methodically killed six members of the Artemis family and then carried on with the rest of her life without a single regret. But having evaded justice for these murders, she is now in Limehouse prison for a crime she did not commit – the death of her foster-brother’s fiancee. To relieve the relentless boredom inside while she awaits her expensive lawyer arranging to get her off her life sentence, she decides to secretly write an accurate account of her life and actions. Re-living the murders, observing her own cleverness, and remembering how she contrived to right a great wrong, helps, though she’s only too conscious that her scribblings are nowhere near the level of Oscar Wilde‘s musings from his prison cell.
Killing her biological grandparents seemed like the least problematic task.
‘… it didn’t matter as much. Old people who do nothing but drain their pensions and stultify in their favourite armchairs isn’t a brilliant advertisement for humanity.’ They’ll only ‘become useless bed blockers who get more and more mean-spirited until they are nothing more than bigoted beasts of burden living in the room you wanted to make a study … old and disposable, and they live staggeringly useless lives.’
Oh, and from the outset her own grandparents wanted nothing to do with their illegitimate granddaughter, Grace, so they don’t deserve to go on living. A ‘natural’, ‘accidental’ death in a car crash attracts no unwarranted attention.
Her cousin Andrew poses a bigger problem. She hasn’t bargained for him being likeable. But, unknown to her, he had already turned his back on wealth and privilege, and now spends his days trying to save the world and mankind through conservation and natural remedies, currently centring on amphibians and hallucinogens. He has put his toxic family out of his life and Grace finds it far harder to carry out her plan with a truly blithe spirit. Finding a way to kill him without arousing suspicion takes a long time in the planning, but his end is suitably gentle and amongst his beloved frogs.
Uncle Lee is a chancer steeped in privilege and greed … a heartless sociopath with nothing at all to recommend him to Grace. It’s a pleasure to carry out her plan with him. His seedy proclivities become his undoing and she watches him die with great satisfaction. But his wife Lara is a different kettle of fish and Grace simply can’t bring herself to harm someone so guileless and decent and wronged.
Her father’s wife Janine, however, is a mean, selfish, indulged woman who spends her whole days doing precisely as she wishes and bullying those whom she considers beneath her. Grace is increasingly drawn to the idea of letting her obscenely luxurious home in Monaco turn on her, and she employs the skill of a needy 17-year-old computer nerd and Janine’s put-upon maid to enable her plan. It’s a calculated risk involving others but she builds in protection for herself to minimise the possibility of a backlash. And again the murder passes as a tragic accident.
Totally spoilt and pampered Bryony, Simon’s 27-year-old legitimate daughter, is the one whose death is most likely (if any) to affect Simon, so Grace leaves her till the penultimate kill. Only when he has suffered this acute loss will she reveal herself and her final intention to him. Bryony has one specific natural weakness which Grace decides to exploit: she is allergic to peaches. The premature death of a young heiress attracts media attention but no suspicion and Grace finally gets a glimpse into the pain she is inflicting on her father.
Only one target left: Daddy dearest himself, the principal victim from the outset. But she hasn’t bargained on him being paranoid for his own safety after losing so many relatives, rendering him virtually unreachable. And it’s an enormous anticlimax when Simon disappears at sea piloting his speedboat while drunk during a visit to his villa in St Tropez. Frustrated and bewildered, Grace weeps for days. Now he would never get to know what she had done and why – the whole point of the plan.
Explanation comes in an unexpected email which she receives the day she is released from prison; an email that will vanish once it’s read. Someone else had a vested interest in the Artemis family; someone else shared a remarkably similar status; someone else was born to a young silly woman dazzled by a larger-than-life Simon Artemis, and then cast aside when he became bored with her; someone else feels entitled to the Artemis’ wealth; someone else was involved in the end of a dynasty. It comes as a complete shock. Especially when that someone knows so much about Grace and her actions. When that someone has effectively scuppered her entire operation.
Journalist and columnist Bella Mackie has created a brilliant plot, based on clever insights into the mind of an emotionally detached but somewhat naive psychopath, and an understanding of human psychology and behaviour. The book is at once gripping, compulsive and chillingly dark. It’s not a comfortable feeling getting inside the head of someone who can kill without scruple, but Mackie manages to keep a lightness of touch and humour by tailoring the deaths – not the usual messy slaughtering, but clean, almost natural ends to pampered lives; and by fleshing out the impact of social injustices and inequalities that fuel Grace’s slow-burning anger, using caustic commentary to give us a degree of sympathy with her single-minded crusade to clean up the world.
The book served as a small diversion from some serious study into much more edifying subjects the waitress at Shugborough would be pleased to know – about virtue and ethics and integrity in real life. The other end of the spectrum from murder.
Interestingly this week the BBC aired a four part programme called The Sixth Commandment based on the true story of a young man who befriended lonely elderly people and conned them out of their money and self respect. He too could take life without scruple. Sobering reality.