The Corpse gets to Narrate: 'What a Way to Go' by Bella Mackie

When you're rich, awful, and surrounded by people just the same, death is only the beginning of your problems....

Bella Mackie's second novel, 'What a Way to Go' (September 2024), takes the whodunit and gives it a wicked twist: the corpse gets to narrate.

Anthony Wistern has spent his life accumulating the trappings of self-made success... A beautiful wife, four grown children, a finance empire built from nothing, a Cotswold manor groaning with 200 party guests on the night of his 60th birthday. He also has a habit of cutting moral corners that would make an accountant blush. Then, mid-celebration, he dies. Unfortunately for Anthony, death doesn't come with an off-switch for his ego, and he finds himself stuck in a grey, bureaucratic afterlife holding centre, unable to move on until he remembers exactly how he met his end. Cue a forced, front-row seat to his own family's unravelling.

The novel splits its narration three ways: Anthony, watching from limbo with the smugness of a man who still can't quite believe he's dead; Olivia, his glamorous, quietly seething widow; and The Sleuth, an anonymous true-crime obsessive who refuses to buy the official story of a tragic accident. As suspicion creeps over every family member with a motive and a slice of inheritance to gain, Mackie lets nobody off the hook; this is a family built on cut corners, and everyone in it is compromised.

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Mackie herself is not short of material to draw on when it comes to skewering the wealthy and the self-satisfied. The daughter of former Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger, she spent years in journalism commissioning editor at the Guardian, deputy editor at Vice News, and a long-running Vogue column before pivoting to books. Her first, 'Jog On', was a memoir about using running to manage anxiety and OCD, and became a Sunday Times bestseller (runner-up only, famously, to Michelle Obama). Her fiction debut, 'How to Kill Your Family', turned her sharp eye on class and inherited wealth into a full-blown revenge comedy, one so successful it's now a Netflix adaptation starring Anya Taylor-Joy. She lives in London, is married to radio presenter Greg James, and by her own account spends a fair amount of time being outwitted by a very large, very stupid dog.

Where 'How to Kill Your Family' had Grace Bernard plotting murder with cool, first-person calculation, 'What a Way to Go' widens its lens. This is less a whodunit built for suspense and more a send-up of a very particular kind of Englishness: the fragrant wife, the photogenic children, the chateau and the manor house, the "plethora of mistresses" politely never discussed at dinner. Mackie has clearly had enormous fun assembling a cast this repugnant, and it shows as the humour is dry, cutting, and entirely unsentimental about who deserves sympathy. Nobody here is a hero, least of all Anthony, whose afterlife commentary drips with the kind of self-regard that got him killed in the first place.

The Sleuth strand is where the book earns its satirical bite, holding up a mirror to our collective, faintly ghoulish appetite for true crime and the way ordinary people now audition as amateur detectives from behind a keyboard. It's a shrewd, timely thread, even if, as some readers have noted, the overall territory of wealth, dysfunction, comeuppance treads close to Mackie's debut. What keeps it fresh is the structural gamble: telling a murder mystery from inside the victim's own confused, aggrieved afterlife is a genuinely clever device, and Mackie commits to it fully rather than treating it as a gimmick.

Emotionally, this isn't a book that asks you to care so much as one that dares you to enjoy watching people get exactly what's coming to them. It's less about grief and more about glee; the vicarious, guilty pleasure of watching the ultra-wealthy implode under the weight of their own carefully maintained facades. For readers who found 'Succession' and 'The White Lotus' irresistible precisely because everyone in them was awful, 'What a Way to Go' offers that same dark comfort: a family with everything, falling spectacularly, hilariously apart.

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