One mystery centered on intrafamilial murder wasn't enough for Bella Mackie, who follows her first novel, How to Kill Your Family, with What a Way to Go, a hilariously bruising riff on the lengths people will go to justify appalling behavior.
The novel begins with the womanizing and underhanded Anthony Wistern's beyond-the-grave reflections on his recent death at his 60th birthday party, held at his country house in the Cotswolds. What Anthony doesn't know is what killed him. Also assuming narrating duties is his dry-eyed and very much alive wife, Olivia, who embraces the widely accepted "accident" theory of Anthony's death. Not buying it is the novel's third narrator, the Sleuth, a 24-year-old YouTuber who posts about Anthony's death; as she notes, "A rich, healthy man like that doesn't just fall into a lake onto a conveniently placed spike while hundreds of people roam about."
Anthony, Olivia, and the Sleuth regard all four Wistern children, ages 17 to 28, with suspicion; each stands to inherit following Anthony's death, and, as Anthony muses, each had a distinct reason to resent him. Meanwhile, Anthony and the Sleuth haven't ruled out Olivia as a suspect. Mackie sends up both the entitled (Olivia: for powerful people, "fixed lines can easily be bent, into enormous squiggles if necessary") and content-creator culture (the Sleuth: "Everything is content, even if it's not relevant"). If What a Way to Go dawdles a bit, well, readers can't expect people like Anthony and Olivia Wistern to be hurried, can they? --Nell Beram, author and freelance writer