An Ethical Guide to Murder by Jenny Morris – blogtour

It’s my turn today on the Random Things blog tour for this intriguing crime novel. But first, I’m sending very best wishes to Anne of Random Things who I know is very unwell at the moment, I hope you get better soon, xx.

Now to the book. It begins with a premonition…

I have an awful feeling that Ruth is going to die today.
We are sitting at our kitchen table, drinking freshly squeezed orange juice and eating cereal. Turh is engrossed in the
British Medical Journal. I am scrolling through TikTok.
‘Pass the Cheerios, please,’ I ask. […]
I take the box, accidentally brushing the box as I do, and that’s when it happens. It’s like a static shock, but on steroids. A high voltage punch to the heart. And I’m left with the irrational but neverthesless undeniable certainty that my best friend of seventeen years is going to die. Tonight. At 11.44 p.m. When she touched me, the date and time appeared in digital clock format, just once, in a flash of light seared inside my eyelids.

This is how Thea discovers that she has a superpower, not that she really believes it yet. She goes off to work, rattled, and once there – she works in HR at a bank – she has to deal with Zara, Ruth’s other besty, who happens to be her boss. Thea gets another jolt and vision when she has to sign for a delivery, but is still thinking it’s her brain playing a trick on her – she needs a nap when she gets home, before going out to celebrate Ruth becoming a fully qualified doctor.

It is later when they’re out clubbing when at 11.44 precisely Ruth gets pushed by guy having an altercation with the bouncer. She falls over hitting her head and is dying, and Thea desperate to save her friend, touches the pusher, and takes his life force, giving it to Thea.

…somehow, even though it makes no logical sense, I know exactly what I’ve taken from him. ‘It’s okay, it’ll be all over soon,’ I say. Then I add in a hushed croak, ‘And I’m sorry. I didn’t have a choice.’

The problem is that doing this has repercussions. It turns out the pusher was Greg, a well-liked young man, and friends with Zara (of course!). No-one can believe that he just dropped dead like that.

So Thea has a quandary now. What to do with her superpower. She believed she was doing it for the greater good, saving Ruth. There’s no-one she can talk to about it, not even her grandfather, the only family she has left. This is when Sam who she’d met at law school, now a barrister, comes back into her life an they become an item, much to Ruth’s disapproval – she doesn’t trust him. Thea tells him her secret and they discuss how it could be used for the true greater good with Thea as an avenging angel. She lets herself be persuaded that it can be ethical to murder someone if they’re completely unethical in their business dealings etc, and the pair engineer meetings to kill these people, who die suddenly but of what they would have died anyway. The police can’t fathom it out.

You can’t help but feel for Thea, she is very relatable, although she’s maybe she becomes a little Villanelle-like (Killing Eve) in a way as she gets deeper and deeper into it, whereas Sam has too much righteous glee to trust. Ruth and Zara are both well-drawn characters too. But Thea is the star who is struggling to find a way to control her power and the excess life force once taken.

I loved the whole thought-provoking cauldron of ethics and psychology that Morris stirs up. It is a cosy-ish novel, given the low gore quotient, but is not really a cosy read, despite its light tone. Through all the twists and turns I was wondering if Thea and Sam would be caught or, if they weren’t – how could Morris possbly bring things to a close? Maybe there would be a set-up for a sequel. In the end, she finds a fitting way to bring the novel to a poignant close.

Novels in which sensitives can see the time of someone’s death are not new. I’ve read Michael J Malone’s The Murmurs and The Torments in which Annie Jackson sees her power as a curse – however, she only sees how someone about to die will meet their ends, she can’t take their life force. Jem in a rather good YA novel by Rachel Ward, Numbers, meanwhile sees dates of death in digital clock style like Thea, but over everyone’s heads all the time – she avoids looking up! These novels put their protagonists in big jeopardy; there are people, and things supernatural in the case of Malone’s books after them.

Where Jenny Morris’s debut novel differs from them, is that she keeps it domestic and entertaining, without gore or a horror element, as well as extending her protagonist’s superpower. This works to her advantage as this novel cannot be pigeonholed into the supernatural sub-genre, and its violence is all in the skin to skin contact as life force ebbs from the victim, enabling that cosy-ish tag. I’ll be really interested to see what she writes next for I enjoyed An Ethical Guide to Murder very much.

Source: Review copy ARC – thank you! Simon & Shuster hardback, 416 pages. BUY at Blackwell’s or Amazon UK via my affiliate links (Amazon will work)

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