Book review: What a Way to Go by Bella Mackie

I received What a Way to Go by Bella Mackie as a temporary ebook so I wasn’t going to review it here but it was so quirky that I decided it deserved a spot on this site (such valuable real estate that it is! 😉 ). Ostensibly it’s a murder mystery but the person charged with solving the whodunnit is in fact the victim – in the afterlife.. well actually a ‘processing centre’, a realm between life and afterlife. The unlikeable Anthony (skewered at his own 60th birthday party) is forced to live a monotonous daily existence in the processing centre until he’s able to remember how he died – to move into the afterlife.

One wealth-obsessed man – who is also dead.

One status-obsessed woman – who is the perfect accessory.

Their four inheritance-obsessed children – each with a killer instinct.

And a murder-obsessed outsider looking to expose them all…

Anthony is dead when the book opens but he’s recounting his final hours, spent at his lavish birthday party. We learn he’s super-rich, regularly cheats on his wife, quite disliked by his children, but smart and charismatic enough to accumulate the wealthiest clients and refuse those he doesn’t deem worthy of his financial advice. We also quickly learn that things are about to fall apart, though the details aren’t forthcoming until later in the novel when the ‘reveal’ shocks members of his family who had no idea of their precarious situation and their father’s role in their ruination.

In the processing centre Anthony watches his family through a ‘viewing window’. It’s here he witnesses the fallout of his death and… of his life. And it certainly says something about his personality – how unrepentant he is about his past actions and decisions.

Anthony’s wife Olivia is our other narrator, left behind but – we learn – not quite the dim society wife everyone (including Anthony) believed her to be. She has secrets of her own. Although Anthony’s children are minimally impacted by their father’s death Olivia has to accept they still preferred him to her, and she’s not terribly upset about that either.

And finally there’s a local girl who’d been on the bad side of Anthony years before. An avid true crime junkie and frequenter of online forums she starts her own YouTube investigation into Anthony’s death. In some ways the ‘Sleuth’ is the most likeable of the characters we meet here, which is certainly saying something given she’s freakishly obsessive and becomes more unhinged as her audience grows.

I appreciated Mackie’s take on the ‘afterlife’ here and she manages to portray that limbo as being muted with grey tracksuits, tasteless food, endless days on repeat. Anthony’s desperate to leave, so watching his family and the ‘Sleuth’, waiting for a clue to help him remember his demise.

The premise of this book is clever and Mackie’s tone (through her narrators) is droll and snarky. Despite the cast of self-absorbed and unlikeable characters and not really caring about the lives lost here (yes, there are plural!) I found myself keen to uncover the who and why which is probably the only disappointing part for me as I didn’t feel I got the ‘closure’ I was hoping for… though Mackie does adds a final stab of rather ironic poetic justice, which came close to giving me the satisfaction I was after.

What a Way to Go by Bella Mackie was published in Australia by Harper Collins.

I received an electronic copy of this book for review purposes.