Not a Happy Family
by Shari Lapena
Wealthy self-made entrepreneur Fred Merton and his wife Sheila live in an exclusive enclave in the Hudson Valley in upstate New York. They have just hosted their three grown children, with their respective spouses or partners, for Easter dinner.
Two days later their cleaning lady, Irena, discovers that both Fred and Sheila have been brutally murdered. Sheila’s body, apparently strangled, is not far inside the front door. Fred is lying in the kitchen in a pool of blood, his throat slashed and his body stabbed many times, with flies buzzing around.
Investigators determine that the murder happened sometime during the night after the Easter dinner. The three Merton children are all suspects: they each stand to inherit a fortune, and it gradually emerges that Fred was a cruel father, testing and psychologically abusing his children, not just in the past but into the present. And Sheila stood by and let the abuse happen.
But all the children appear to have alibis. And there are other suspects as well. What about Fred’s sister? Or Irena, the cleaning lady who was formerly the children’s full-time nanny?
The story has many twists and turns. The characters all have secrets, and their lies and deceptions only gradually come to light. This is a true page-turner, with the murderer not revealed until the end.
Not a Happy Family is Shari Lapena’s sixth domestic thriller. Her first, The Couple Next Door, became a runaway success when it came out in 2016. Since then she’s published a book a year, adding A Stranger in the House, An Unwanted Guest, Someone We Know, and The End of Her. All of them have appeared on numerous bestseller lists including those of the New York Times and the UK Sunday Times.
Lapena was an avid reader since childhood, loving books by Agatha Christie, Josephine Tey, Daphne Du Maurier, and Patricia Highsmith among others. But becoming a writer didn’t seem a practical career choice; instead she worked as a lawyer and then as an English teacher. When she had her first child she became a stay-at-home mother, and—as many other women authors have done—she found a way to carve out writing time in between her family activities.
Her first novel, Things Go Flying, was published by a small Canadian press in 2007 (the year she turned 47) followed by Happiness Economics two years later. She describes these books as “literary comedies.” Both novels were well-received in Canada, nominated for literary awards, but had only modest sales and had no profile internationally.
That changed with her first suspense novel, The Couple Next Door. Lapena says she wrote it in secret, not telling anyone she was writing a thriller because she wasn’t sure she could do it. But when it was published in 2016, it flew to the top of bestseller lists including the New York Times list, and since then she’s written a new thriller every year. Her books have now sold in thirty-five territories around the world.
Lapena lives in Toronto..
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