-
Access Our
Best Book Club
Books of 2025!
Summary | Excerpt | Reviews | Beyond the book | Read-Alikes | Genres & Themes | Author Bio
A Novel
by Asia Mackay
Book Reviewed by:Two former serial killers trying to keep their past buried realize that old habits die hard in this "wildly original, razor-sharp thriller" (Chris Whitaker, New York Times bestselling author of All the Colors of the Dark).
I wasn't smashing the patriarchy; I was killing it. Literally.
Hazel and Fox are an ordinary married couple with a baby. Except for one small thing: they're murderers. Well, they used to be. They had it all. An enviable London lifestyle, five-star travels, and plenty of bad men to rid from the world. Then Hazel got pregnant.
Now, they're just another mom-and-dad-and-baby. They gave up vigilante justice for life in the suburbs: arranged play dates instead of body disposals, diapers over daggers, mommy conversations instead of the sweet seduction right before a kill. Hazel finds her new life terribly dull. And the more she forces herself to play her monotonous, predictable role, the more she begins to feel that murderous itch again.
Meanwhile, Fox has really taken to being a father. Always the planner, he loves being five steps ahead of everyone and knowing exactly what's coming around the bend. Plus, if anyone can understand Hazel needing one more kill, it's Fox. But then Hazel kills someone without telling Fox. And when police show up at their door, Hazel realizes it will take everything she has to keep her family together.
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... Sparkling, witty dialogue and quippy humor make the couple more Nick and Nora Charles than Manson Family...continued
Full Review
(897 words)
(Reviewed by Sara Fiore).
In A Serial Killer's Guide to Marriage, Fox and Hazel are an attractive, wealthy, glamorous couple who kill others for sport. (But they only kill evil men, like rapists and child abusers—making them, in the reader's eyes, less serial killers and more vigilantes.) Their wealth and beauty offer them an inconspicuousness that lets them literally get away with murder. But there is a different kind of privilege that these qualities may afford a killer, which is public approval.
Many criminals and vigilantes have come to be lauded rather than reviled for their crimes—for daring to do things that others won't, for seeking justice outside of corrupt institutions or failing systems. One need look no further than Luigi Mangione, the ...
If you liked A Serial Killer's Guide to Marriage, try these:
by Kate Fagan
Published 2025
The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo meets First Lie Wins in this electric, voice-driven debut novel about an elusive bestselling author who decides to finally confess her true identity after years of hiding from her past.
by Parini Shroff
Published 2024
A young Indian woman finds the false rumors that she killed her husband surprisingly useful—until other women in the village start asking for her help getting rid of their own husbands—in this razor-sharp debut.
Chris Whitaker, New York Times bestselling author of All the Colors of the Dark
Sexy, stylish, thrilling, and funny ... Asia Mackay rips up the rulebook in this wildly original, razor-sharp tale of marriage and murder, mundanity and mayhem. I loved it.
.gif)