BookBrowse Reviews A Serial Killer's Guide to Marriage by Asia Mackay

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A husband and wife must find their way back to each other as the responsibilities of family life intrude on their formerly glamorous (and murderous) lifestyle.

What do you do when the honeymoon's over? When the first blush of love fades into the gray fog of daily drudgery? When stolen kisses and elaborate dates are replaced with school pickups and dentist appointments? When your husband decides it's time to give up murdering people so that you can set a good example for your daughter?

Who can't relate to that?

Alright, maybe not the murdering part—but despite the couple's macabre extracurricular activities, readers will be hard-pressed not to empathize with vigilante serial killers Fox and Hazel as they navigate marriage, parenthood, and their murderous impulses. Their struggle to balance giving their daughter the loving life they never had with a burning need to work out their issues through the torture and killing of rapists, wife beaters, and child abusers makes for genuinely hilarious, if occasionally dark, reading.

A Serial Killer's Guide to Marriage unfolds in chapters that alternate points of view, so that we get both Hazel and Fox's wonderfully distinct, slightly insane perspectives, and between past and present, contrasting the exciting early days of their relationship with the routine of marriage. The reader witnesses their unconventional meet cute: Fox comes across Hazel, mid-kill, in a dark alley, and helps her finish the job and dispose of the corpse. They learn that they've both been indulging in the same "pastime" to deal with their personal demons, both rooted in childhood—Hazel bounced around abusive foster homes; Fox was neglected by his unloving, wealthy parents. They marry after six months. Hazel reflects that she "found someone who shared my passion, who understood me, who really saw me. We both understood this darkness in us needed an outlet, and that it was one that could be used to make the world a better place."

For a while, Hazel and Fox jet set around the world, living off of Fox's trust fund while Hazel's art career starts to blossom, and indulge in murder. But in the present day, the married couple barely manages to speak to each other without descending into vicious fights. Hazel has an increasingly uncontrollable yearning to leave behind the "Mommy and Me" classes and return to the thing that first bonded them together. "I knew all she'd wanted these last few years was for me to hold her close and murmur, 'Let's go hunting,'" Fox thinks about his wife. "I knew she longed for those words like other women long for 'I love you,' 'Marry me,' 'Let's have a baby.'" But Fox is pragmatic; he wants to live a "normal" life for the sake of their daughter, and he can't bear the thought that if they're caught, their daughter would grow up in the foster system, as unloved and lonely as they both were.

This rift has left them resentful, isolated from each other, and, despite their deep love for their daughter, questioning their relationship. "We were so busy having fun and being happy that we never took the time to work out if it was the life we loved or each other," Hazel thinks. "Once you stripped away the glitz and the glamour and the blood, was there even anything left of us?" When Hazel "falls off the wagon" and commits an "accidental" murder that brings the police to their door, she—unable to be honest with her husband—is primarily concerned with keeping him from finding out she's broken their deal.

Some readers may want to dislike these seductively charming anti-heroes, not just because of their hobbies but because of the privilege their wealth, beauty, and whiteness grant them. But it's a testament to Mackay's engaging character writing that instead of resenting or outright hating Hazel and Fox, the reader almost immediately roots for them. They aren't greedy or mercenary. Their privilege, of which they are fully aware, simply allows them to do what they love—making the world a better place by removing genuinely evil men from it.

Mackay smartly makes Hazel and Fox's love for each other and their devotion to their daughter the crux of the novel, while murder becomes just another hobby that takes a backseat to adult responsibilities. Sparkling, witty dialogue and quippy humor make the couple more Nick and Nora Charles than Manson Family. Mackay also keeps most of the murder "off stage" (making the vitriolic marital squabbles the book's truly vicious moments). The only real violence is the depiction of Hazel and Fox's respective first kills—Hazel's a bar owner who tries and fails to make her his fourth rape victim and meets the wrong end of a corkscrew; Fox's a Cornell frat boy stabbed with a knife he intended to use on Fox—so that we can understand why they choose their victims as they do. There's also a violent confrontation in the book's final moments, which I won't spoil here, but which feels nicely cathartic, a release of all the tension, anger, and passion that Fox and Hazel have been repressing.

Fox and Hazel are every married couple you've ever met. They need to learn to be better communicators. They need to make time for their marriage outside of raising their child. They need to remember who they are as individuals and prioritize time for themselves. In this case, that also just happens to include finding the time for the odd murder. This black romantic comedy is perfect for contemporary romance lovers who enjoy a little dark humor with their happily ever after.

This review first ran in the January 15, 2025 issue of BookBrowse Recommends.