Every domestic thriller treats marriage like a raft: two people, one vessel, betting neither one rocks it hard enough to sink them both. Shari Lapena puts hers on actual water. Getting Away with Murder opens with a squall on the open Atlantic, three people aboard, and by the next chapter only the brownstone's calm is left standing. The book doesn't stay in that storm, but whatever happened out there follows Jill and Ted home, and it never quite leaves.
Before the storm, there's the real subject: the house. Jill and Ted have spent years turning a New York townhouse into an extension of their own self-regard, right down to the staircase, and when Ted's inheritance runs dry and a bad investment follows it, the brownstone becomes the one thing they refuse to lose. Lapena doesn't linger on the panic. She skips straight to the plan: one relative, comfortably wealthy, conveniently mortal, and a payout large enough to make the math irresistible.
What makes the plan work, on paper, is the marriage itself, plus the flattering math the two of them build to justify it. Jill and Ted don't need an alibi from a stranger. They need one from each other, and better than that, they need to believe the man they're targeting deserves what's coming: unpleasant enough, undeserving enough of the money, that removing him reads less like a crime to them than a correction. The price of that comfort is total trust, which happens to be the one currency married people are worst at keeping in stock. Suspicion creeps in once the stakes are set, and the book turns ordinary marital friction into something closer to interrogation. Read enough of it and you start doing what Jill and Ted do: cataloguing your spouse's tells instead of following the plot. Underneath the dread runs a vein of dry, dark comedy. It surfaces in how reasonable these two sound while planning something monstrous. Lapena plays it for irony more than horror: two people convinced they're the sensible ones in the room, right up until they're not.
The relative in question turns out to be family in the most complicated sense. Not a childless aunt with a fortune, but a brother, which means the money comes tangled in decades of history the two men have never actually settled. Lapena has built plots at this scale before, and it shows: twists spaced often enough that guessing right feels like luck rather than skill. Nobody here is likable. Nobody needs to be. A murder plot runs better on people you wouldn't trust to water your plants. It's also a swerve on the genre's usual target, a distant relation with money and no real hold on the leads. Whether the specific scheme holds up under scrutiny depends on how far a reader is willing to extend two people who are already this deep in denial. The family tie at least justifies the stakes; a stranger's name on a will wouldn't have carried the same weight.
This is Lapena's tenth turn at this particular kind of story, and the experience shows in the machinery. The reveals land on schedule. The tension never slackens long enough to let anyone double back and find the seams. It reads like a writer who has done this enough times to know exactly how long to hold a scene before cutting away from it. The prose stays plain by design. It gets out of the way of the plot, which is the trade this genre rewards over ornament.
The one place the control slips is the ending. After a long stretch of screws tightening, one wrong word from disaster, the resolution arrives fast, faster than the patience that built it. Setup honored, mostly, though the finish spends in a handful of pages what the rest of the book took its time building. It's the one stretch where the plotting outruns itself.
Why you should read
- Fans of morally compromised leads over likable ones
- Readers who want marriage tested by a shared secret
- Domestic suspense fans who prioritize plot over introspection
- Anyone who likes a fast, twist-heavy thriller
What to expect
- Brisk chapters built for binge reading
- An ending that resolves faster than the buildup
- Two unlikeable, calculating protagonists
- Dry, dark humor under constant tension
What stays with you is the house, and how completely two people let a staircase and an address decide what they were willing to do.
