Murder For Revenge

Judith Kelman

Judith Kelman shares with her friend Mary Higgins Clark the ability to walk us gently to the edge of a well-manicured lawn where just beyond yawns a terrifying abyss. Her popular novels, which include ‘Hush Little Darlings’, ‘The House on the Hill’, and ‘Fly Away Home’, are quite brilliant at turning seemingly secure suburban neighbourhoods into bedroom communities for hell. It is not difficult to see how well earned is Kelman’s success: she truly gets us where we live.

Sometimes, however, writers just want to have fun. Here, in a story that positively drips gleeful venom, Kelman takes a new route through her usual territory. How does one imagine afresh version of the familiar heroine-as-victim? Think high-school reunion and a moment, decades after the original adolescent humiliations, when justice is finally served… and found to be deliciously lethal.