Everyone in My Family Has Killed Someone

Family is not whose blood runs in your veins, it's who you'd spill it for.

But I promised to be reliable, not competent

If a killer is ever revealed and your ‘percentage read’ isn’t at least in the high eighties, they cannot be the real killer; there is simply too much of the book still to be read.

Anger is as much an heirloom as any Rolex.

Owe, owe, owe. You use that word so much. A family is not a credit card.

Call me a reliable narrator. Everything I tell you will be the truth, or, at least, the truth as I knew it to be at the time that I thought I knew it.

You can tell a lot about someone from whether they can handle an uncomfortable silence. If they ride it out or snap it off.

But a bad person who thinks they’re a good one—now, that’s what got him into trouble.

This works to spoil films too: the highest-profile actor with the fewest lines is always the villain, and a sudden wide-shot of a character crossing a road means they are about to be hit by a car. A good author must not only wrong-foot the reader within the narrative, they must do it within the form of the novel itself. There are clues baked into the very object.

Every basic task starts to feel like a decision, and that becomes so draining that you end up unable to make any of them.

I’ll hold it here to mention that I know some authors are incapable of having a woman throw up without it being a clue to a pregnancy. These same authors seem to think nausea is the only indication of childbearing, not to mention their belief that vomit shoots out the woman’s mouth within hours of plot-convenient fertilisation. By some authors, I mean male ones.

One day you’ll realize family isn’t about whose blood runs in your veins, it’s who you’d spill it for.

The wind was cruel; it found every crevasse in my clothes, invaded and patted me down like I owed it money.

...my editor had crossed out my first go at this sentence and written Hypo=cold, Hyper=hot in the margin, in that helpful yet smug voice editors are born with, wishing to both correct you and impart their correctness upon you at the same time.

I am normally resolute in declining any invitation that comes with an Excel spreadsheet attached.

Have I killed someone? Yes. I have. Who was it? Let’s get started.

I'm sorry about before," I said. Seeing as we were shoulder to shoulder, I spoke outwards, lobbing my apology into the void of the mountain. It's the only way blokes know how to show humility, by pretending we're at a urinal.

We are seven chapters away from the next death.

If a killer is ever revealed and your “percentage read” isn’t at least in the high eighties, they cannot be the real killer; there is simply too much of the book still to be read.

Just look at how they’ve treated you. And you still think you owe them? One day you’ll realise family isn’t about whose blood runs in your veins, it’s who you’d spill it for.

There is only one plot hole you could drive a truck through.

Do you promise that your detectives shall well and truly detect the crimes presented to them using those wits which it may please you to bestow upon them and not placing reliance on nor making use of Divine Revelation, Feminine Intuition, Mumbo Jumbo, Jiggery-Pokery, Coincidence, or Act of God? —Membership oath of the Detection Club, 1930, a secret society of mystery writers including Agatha Christie, G. K. Chesterton, Ronald Knox, and Dorothy L. Sayers

Everyone in my family has killed someone. Some of us, the high achievers, have killed more than once.

Andy didn’t need to say aloud what I’d written under “Next of kin”—It’s a family reunion, so anyone here, unless Avalanche

Because now I know that in the months after something so devastating, everything feels like sleepwalking.

one of the kindest things you can do to someone is to cut them off.

Your bias is not only showing, it’s making you look like an idiot.

I’d been so desperate to make a family, to force Erin to make me one, that I’d forgotten the one that had formed around me. Family is gravity. I realized then what Sofia had told me back at the very start of all this. Family is not whose blood runs in your veins, it’s who you’d spill it for.

We haven’t met properly,” I said, as she threaded me through housekeeping carts vomiting fluffy white towels. “People call me Ern.” “As in, cremated?” “It’s short for Ernest.