A Sociopath’s Guide to a Successful Marriage

The darkly funny gripping new thriller introducing your new favourite murderous heroine: Lalla Rook.

‘The most wildly entertaining novel you’ll read this year: suspenseful but funny, shocking yet stylish… and sophisticated, too – a story with cold blood in its veins and bright ideas in its head’ – A. J. Finn

Lalla Rook is happily in possession of an adoring husband, two beautiful children, and a beautiful house. (Tick, tick, tick). She’s even stopped killing people (double tick). Or had, until she found an uninvited man snooping through her living room. Now she has a dead body to dispose of amidst the stress of hosting a 4-year-old’s birthday party. But the show must go on – you can’t cancel key social events without difficult questions being asked, not even for an unidentified corpse in your front room.

Lalla can’t pretend she hasn’t missed the adrenaline rush that comes with murder. As a wife and mother she’s necessarily an expert multi-tasker. So, burying a body, framing a friend and simultaneously assisting her daughter into a top school can be managed alongside the usual domestic minutiae. It’s just that her husband Stephen seems distracted, her daughter’s drowning of the class hamster is affecting her prospects and then there is the unexpected reappearance of an old flame, a man she has already killed once, several years earlier. And, inconveniently, the police have chosen the worst possible time to be finally taking an interest in her.