Back then, Quinn’s bad breakup leads her to the love of her life. The “then and now” format-with alternating chapters moving back and forth in time-allows a hopeful romance to blossom within a dark but relatable dilemma. A few years later, they are happily married but struggling to conceive. Quinn meets her future husband, Graham, in front of her soon-to-be-ex-fiance’s apartment, where Graham is about to confront him for having an affair with his girlfriend. Named for an imperfectly worded fortune cookie, Hoover's ( It Ends with Us, 2016, etc.) latest compares a woman’s relationship with her husband before and after she finds out she’s infertile. Along the way, there are scattered glimpses of life in Lagos, most acidly when Korede deals with the routine corruption involved in a traffic stop.Įven your most extravagant speculations about what’s really going on with these wildly contrasting yet oddly simpatico siblings will be trumped in this skillful, sardonic debut. But besides the setting, what makes Braithwaite’s first novel stand out from others in this genre is the unobtrusively sly approach she takes to the conventions of “black widow” storytelling and the appealing deadpan voice of the jittery yet world-weary Korede. Generations of gothic mystery aficionados have attended these uneasy and insidious events before. Now she tries to warn Tade that her sister’s relationships “tend to end, badly.' His response: “Oh…guys can be jerks.” (Yes, they certainly can.) As Tade and Ayoola begin their romance, Korede’s the one who has to answer questions about Femi’s disappearance, and, seemingly out of nowhere, Ayoola acquires yet another suitor named Gboyega, prompting both Korede and the reader to wonder which of these unwary gentlemen Ayoola will favor and what will happen to him. So that, as Korede is concerned, is that except there’s this single good-looking doctor named Tade at the hospital where she works who has his eye on Ayoola-even though Korede has tried her best to win Tade’s attention. They both disposed of the most recent victim, a poet named Femi, so efficiently that nobody in his family or with the police know his whereabouts. (Three, so far.) She hasn’t been caught yet because Korede cleans up after her. There’s one secret in particular that pours out of Korede like scalding liquid: Her flamboyantly beautiful younger sister, Ayoola, has this habit of killing the men she dates. She feels such a connection with her patients that she finds herself taking a coma victim named Muhtar into her confidence. Introverted, sensitive Korede is a nurse, a very good one from what we see of her at work.

From the hospital rooms and living spaces of Lagos, Nigeria, comes a dryly funny and wickedly crafty exercise in psychological suspense.

My sister the serial killer