Bella Mackie has a thing for appalling, appallingly wealthy people. Her first novel, How to Kill Your Family (not a manual, despite being written during Covid) sold more than a million copies and features a vengeful lovechild, Grace, who discovers her absentee mega-rich father ignored the pleas of her dying mother. So she sets out to kill him and his family, one by one.
Mackie’s second novel, What a Way to Go , reuses this formula: country estates, crime scenes, blood diamonds and snide class commentary. The book centres on the death of Anthony Wistern, a millionaire hedgefund manager nicknamed “Goldicocks” by the tabloid press (a moniker that immediately falls apart on questioning: is it a reference to his general prickish behaviour or his extramarital activities? Is he just really fussy about his ..
. porridge? And, why, God, why, the plural?). This is not a spoiler; the late Anthony partly narrates the story, and the first sentence of the book is: “Looking back on it now, I wouldn’t change much about the night I died.
” At his 60th birthday party, he fell – or was pushed – on to a spike holding one of many glowing glass orbs suspended in the lake of the family’s Cotswolds house (they also have one in London and one in France). What a way to go, indeed. It’s delectably ludicrous.
Different observers describe him as having been variously “speared”, “lanced”, “harpooned” and “impaled” – the last the best of the synonyms, for giving rise to .