Like The Serial Killers’ Club (2006) by Jeff Povey and the Darkly Dreaming Dexter (2004-15) series by Jeff Lindsay, Joanna Wallace’s debut You’d Look Better as a Ghost (2023) takes on the challenge of seeing the world through a serial killer’s eyes. Wallace, though, takes the far harder route of not trying to justify her killer’s murderous urges by having them only kill ‘bad people’, and instead invites you to spend nearly 400 pages with Claire, who is unhinged enough to murder a man who accidentally emailed her incorrect information, and who blithely admits that she “like[s] to peel the skin off queue-jumpers”. It shouldn’t work. But, thanks in no small way to some pitch-black humour, boy, does it.

Part of the fun here is the obvious escalation of the understandable frustration that any normal person would feel into the realm of murderous psychosis. Through canny asides and a total absence of self-pitying reflection we’re exposed to Claire’s calm, measured confidence when it comes to deciding people should die for these minor infractions, and the obvious parody of the sane response to these things is part of what makes this novel so successful. Yes, there is humour, but the incautious over-application of humour to horrifying situations can sometimes feel like a shortcut to the reader’s sympathies, hiding the morally repugnant behind something that has a smile on its face. Wallace is cleverer than that, leaving much of Claire’s thinking unhampered by jokiness, or, at her most brilliant, tying Claire’s blank-faced convictions to gallows humour that serves only to highlight how very, very dark the situation has become (“At least that shouldn’t be a problem for Derek and his navigational skills.”).

Interestingly, as with Wallace’s second novel The Dead Friend Project (2024), this is also a study of grief, with Claire’s father having recently died, thus severing, one feels, the only real connection she was ever likely to feel to another human being. A series of flashbacks work in some wonderfully unmawkish sympathy without ever attempting — thank god — to ‘explain’ Claire’s madness, and the clear love between the two is felt all the more strongly as these develop. That his death is, in a way, the catalyst that kicks off the plot here (“Since Dad died…I’ve definitely become more reckless with my kills. I guess not all mounds of emotional debris are the same.”) feels right for this character, and the grief counselling group she attends provides some of the book’s high spots (“Is she seriously going to let Welshman list every occupation he can think of?”).

I really can’t overstate the excellence of what Wallace has achieved here. The urge to always lean into the quip in these situations must be strong, not least because the current cinematic juggernaut earning billions at the box office these days does exactly that. But some of the best jokes come at the darkest moments…

Whoever took this footage has managed to capture Tall Woman in the bathroom mirror. She appears to have scraped her hair back into an Alice band and is watching [the man] and smiling. The image repulses me. It’s never OK for a grown woman to wear an Alice band.

…and, in a cultural age when Big Moral Moments are typically met with swelling strings and plenty of lachrymosity, some of the most telling Realisations here almost slide past you, so effortlessly are they worked into the narrative:

I wonder whether I’m experiencing empathy. And if so, I wonder why it’s chosen this moment to arrive.

In years to come — hell, start now — I like to think Wallace’s books will be studied as sublime examples of how to work in character without info-dumping, so much do we come to realise about Claire without having to be told for pages and pages. And what we are told (her use of cliché, for example) serves only to lay groundwork for something grander that the reader is treated intelligently about. Wallace’s plotting, too, is exemplary, building with apparent effortlessness in the background as Claire gets pulled into more events, and as a few startling developments — I won’t lie, I gasped on at least two occasions — capture the eye here.

I can fault this only in that the plot is so expertly constructed that it requires two people to be locked in a room so that one of them can monologue at length about how all the events have come to support each other; but, in fairness, this is something Wallace already improved in her second novel and, look, it would break my heart if this book were too close to perfection. A flaw to iron out over her coming career simply gives me something to root for. In an age when it feels like so many books are written by committee to feature the Topic of the Moment, Joanna Wallace’s fearlessly inventive, magnificently-constructed, acutely-observed, and perfectly-pitched character pieces give me hope for modern crime fiction. And not an impossible crime in sight! Shows you just how wonderful these books must be; here’s hoping there are many more of them.