Not a Happy Family by Shari Lapena was our October Book Club Read. Did we love or loathe it? Read our honest review to find out.
First up what’s Not a Happy Family about?
In a nutshell it’s a twist-filled family murder mystery set in upstate New York. Wealthy parents Fred and Sheila Merton host the annual Easter dinner for their three adult children and their partners. The next day the parents are found brutally murdered in their home. With each sibling standing to inherit millions, everyone becomes a suspect.
What did our book club think?
The consensus was this whodunnit was easy to read. The plot kept twisting and turning and the characters are thoroughly unlikeable. So much so, you don’t have much sympathy for anyone, including the victims. As the title says this is definitely Not a Happy Family. And this isn’t a spoiler, but the killer could be anyone.
For some members Shari Lapena had a very engaging writing style, and we loved the dialogue heavy style and the ease in which you stepped into each character’s heads. However, others were not so keen but did concede this book wasn’t their normal genre.
At the beginning there were lots of characters dropped in very quickly and a number of us did need to go back and reread sections to work out who was who. One member even took to the internet for a cast sheet to keep on track. The author does also have a tendency to land characters into the story rather abruptly. The youngest sister’s boyfriend was the most interesting. But we thought the brother was the best written with a strong sense of him spiralling downwards as he loses his grasp on reality.
Was there anything our book club didn’t like about the story?
Some members found the story started to drag a little bit around the 4/5th mark. Maybe there were too many twists and turns for our group.
But our biggest peeve was the ending. The whole book builds and builds to who could be the killer and then wham, you suddenly have the killer saying yes, it’s me and this is how I did it. It was as if Lapena got so far and either thought ‘I don’t know how to end this’ or ‘that’s me done.’
Opinion was definitely divided when it came to the epilogue. Some saw it having a big hole in it. That the killer would never have allowed the ending to happen like that. Whereas others thought it did work because the killer was so monumentally arrogant. And that’s not a spoiler because lots of the characters are!
Based on previous Shari Lapena thrillers, there was a sense that the author’s books follow a pattern with similarly structured endings. In this way, if you enjoy one, you’re bound to enjoy the others.