Review: What A Way To Go by Bella Mackie
Anthony Wistern has it all. Enormous wealth, beautiful houses, social standing, business success, and a family that any self-made man would be proud of.
He’s also dead.
What A Way To Go opens at Anthony’s 60th birthday party, a wildly extravagant and artfully-lit demonstration of his wealth and success. By the end of the evening he is gruesomely dead, and there is no shortage of suspects who may have caused his demise.
The book rotates around three narrators - Olivia, Anthony’s wife; an internet ‘true-crime’ sleuth whose name we don’t discover until much further on into the book; and Anthony himself, speaking to us from a liminal afterlife. The audiobook I listened to had different narrators for each voice and while I’m not always a fan of multi-voice narration, it really worked for this one. Each of the accents, tone, and pacing was accurate and distinct, and I didn’t even employ my normal increase of playback speed, as there were so many small nuances that I didn’t want to miss.
As well as being a well-paced whodunnit, with drip-fed clues and red herrings, What A Way To Go is also an immensely clever social commentary. Without being heavy-handed, Mackie addresses social isolation, online clout-chasing, relationship challenges (many thereof), class issues, wealth gaps, privilege and power imbalance. She does so with a healthy dose of humour - sometimes dark, often subtle, but always there. I especially appreciated the character of the citizen investigator, and the delicate building of the background that brought her to this case.
The icing on this particular murder cake for me is how Mackie manages to deliver an entire cast of characters who were irremediably unlikeable, and yet entirely engage the reader with their stories and experiences. Each time the narrator shifted I was happy to come back to their thread, and this kept the book moving well.
By the time all the guilty parties and their comeuppances were revealed, it felt like a really annoying itch had been thoroughly scratched. If you’re looking for a new read, it’s hard to do better than this.
Get your copy of What A Way To Go from Amazon (UK) or Amazon (US) now
Or pick it up from bookshop.org
Ad - PR copy. Thank you Harper Collins for providing this book for review consideration. The review is unpaid and all opinions are my own.
