Lilibet Bombshell's Reviews > How to Kill Men and Get Away with It

On the day the physical ARC of this dark, twisted, and audaciously funny novel showed up on my doorstep I knew I was going to love it when I read it simply from one little thing that has since been removed from the cover but was on my copy: If you look in the lower left hand corner of my picture, in very fine print, it says, “For legal purposes: a novel”.

Cheeky. I snickered over that small bit of fine print for a little bit and even took a pic of it and sent it to my bestie because I thought it was that cheeky.

How to Kill Men and Get Away With It isn’t a cheeky book, however. It’s dark, twisted, wicked smart, tragically funny, merciless in its anger, and unforgiving in its social criticisms. Katy Brent managed that rare feat of literary alchemy of perfectly weaving exposition into narrative without skipping a beat or losing a single bit of momentum in what had to have been a hard book to keep on track and keep even in both tone and pacing.

While men are the most obvious target of anger and criticism in this book, don’t think that a single character (including Kitty, our protagonist), is immune to being a target of the book’s criticisms. The second largest set of people this book targets with anger and criticism are people who are glued to their social media accounts and what they’ll do to grow their accounts, keep their followers, and keep the money from collaborations and sponcon coming in. The third largest set of people to be razed and criticized are the rich and their tendency to do things purely for the power of virtue signaling (eco-tourism, holding huge charity galas, visiting orphanages in war-torn countries, adopting war orphans only to have nannies raise them, etc).

Kitty Collins is the vegan heiress to a meat corporation. She’s been on her own since she was 18 and her mom moved to the south of France. Her dad went missing a couple of years before then. Kitty may be rich, but her posh apartment was set up for her by her mom before she left the UK and Kitty doesn’t spend any of the money she gets from being the heir to what she thinks of as blood money: she gets plenty of money and free products from just being Kitty Collins, one of the most popular influencers on Instagram. Her only family are her fellow astronomically-high follower count influencers, who she fully admits all have eating disorders, daddy issues, and absolutely have love affairs with alcohol and drugs of different shapes and sizes. They don’t tend to hang around other people, because who else is really worth their time?

Kitty doesn’t really like people, but especially men. When one follows her out of a bar after she turns down his advances they have a physical argument and the man falls onto a broken half of a champagne bottle, which goes straight into a major artery. Kitty can’t help him and knows it wasn’t completely her fault, so she leaves the man there and goes home.

The next day, she feels revitalized. She feels like she’s glowing. She doesn’t feel any guilt or remorse for what happened. She feels energetic and better than she has in some time. She took out a predator. A man who wanted to take what she wasn’t willing to give. She has no issue with that. She wouldn’t change a thing.

I love how Katy Brent engineers Kitty Collins’ “code” for killing to make it look like Kitty is doing her own kind of virtue signaling by committing these vigilante murders: No kids, no women, no disabled people, no veterans, no homeless people, etc. As if murder isn’t murder no matter how you frame it. Not to mention, the road to hell is paved with good intentions and rules were made to be broken. As Kitty sits down to write herself her “code”, you can’t help but get the feeling that this code is going to come back and bite her in the butt later. You have to be careful with murder. You can’t risk recklessness. That’s how you get caught.

The barbed, mocking tone that permeates this book is a joy to read simply because it matches up so nicely with the vacuousness of social media culture. Think of how easy it is to mock the people who are famous simply for being…them? How does one get famous and rich simply for being spotted at that one party that one night at the same time as that one celebrity and now somehow they have 10K more followers on Insta and are being sent sponcon and asked to collaborate for companies that aren’t scams? But once you’re up there with the influencers who have more followers than the population of a decent-sized city, what else is there? Who else is there? All day, every day, you’re just treated like an empty piece of meat for the public to consume. What will you do about it?

I was provided a digital galley of this title by NetGalley and the author. I was also provided a physical ARC of this title by the folks at HarperCollins through their influencer program. All thoughts, opinions, ideas, and views expressed herein are mine and mine alone. Thank you.

File Under: 5 Star Read/Dark Comedy/Murder Thriller/Psychological Fiction/Satire/Suspense Thriller/Vigilante/Women’s Fiction