Recommended for fans of: dysfunctional family dramas, dark humour, morally questionable characters and a good old-fashioned battle over money.
What happens when your father falls head over heels for a woman whose previous three husbands are all dead? If you’re Cat Farrand, you start digging.
Diana Leyland has her sights firmly set on wealthy David and the comfortable future he represents. Unfortunately, David comes with an adult daughter, Cat, who is far less enamoured with his new love. Once Cat begins looking into Diana’s marital history, the prospect of welcoming a new stepmother into the family starts to look rather more sinister.
I really enjoyed Claws Out. At its heart, this is a wonderfully messy family drama, with a devilish prospective stepmum on one side and an increasingly cornered adult daughter on the other. Neither woman is particularly inclined to back down, and watching their relationship deteriorate into a battle of wills is great fun.
Cat herself is hardly the archetypal plucky heroine. She’s privileged, flawed and sometimes spectacularly ill-advised, but that actually made the story more entertaining for me. There’s something rather satisfying about a novel in which you don’t necessarily have to decide who the good person is before choosing whose side you’re on.
Diana, meanwhile, makes a formidable opponent. Three husbands have already met untimely ends and now she has found wealthy husband number four. Is Cat right to be suspicious, or is she simply an adult daughter worried about her inheritance? That question gives the novel its mystery, while the increasingly hostile relationship between the two women provides much of its humour.
Despite murder and suspicious deaths lurking in the background, this is surprisingly light-hearted. Mackie has plenty of fun with her characters and their preoccupation with money and status, while the wealthy London setting provides fertile ground for some pointed observations about privilege. The alternating perspectives also mean we get to see the battle from both sides rather than simply viewing Diana through Cat’s suspicious eyes.
And then there’s Zeb, Diana’s adult son, who adds another rather unexpected dimension to proceedings. His unusual connection with animals takes the story into some decidedly quirky territory – not something I was expecting when I began reading!
There are twists along the way, and the story becomes increasingly outrageous as Cat finds herself backed further into a corner. For me, though, the real pleasure wasn’t simply working out what had happened to Diana’s husbands; it was watching this deeply dysfunctional collection of people manoeuvre against one another.
Claws Out is dark without feeling particularly heavy: a sharp, entertaining mixture of murder mystery, family drama and social satire. I had a lot of fun with it.
Thank you to Bella Mackie, The Borough Press and NetGalley UK for this ARC in exchange for my honest review.
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Do you enjoy novels where practically everyone is at least a little bit awful? And would three mysteriously dead husbands be enough to make you investigate your prospective stepmother?
