Sweetpea

Rhiannon works as an editorial assistant in a small English town. On the surface she leads an ordinary life: a boyfriend named Craig, a small dog, a job she complains about. Underneath it, a crime from her childhood, one that once put her name in the papers, left her capable of killing without a flicker of guilt, and she has been doing it ever since.

She keeps a running list of people who cross her: a checkout worker who bruises her fruit, a driver who cuts her off, a coworker who talks over her in meetings. Each one, eventually, gets crossed off. Skuse tells the story in Rhiannon's own voice, diary-close and darkly funny, so a petty office slight and a killing get the same flat, exacting attention.

It reads less like a whodunit than a black comedy narrated by its own villain. The horror lands as a joke that keeps going a beat after it should have stopped being funny. The first half moves fast and stays gleeful.

Rhiannon's control starts to slip once she begins an affair with a much younger man and discovers she is pregnant by him. Holding her double life together gets harder just as her patience runs out, and the comedy curdles into something closer to a thriller. Sweetpea is the first novel in Skuse's Sweetpea series, continued in In Bloom, and was adapted into a television series starring Ella Purnell.