Helen Fitzgerald, Dead Lovely (2007)

This thriller is the author´s debut. Helen Fitzgerald grew up in Australia, but has made her career as a writer in Glasgow.

As the bait quotation shows, we are told on the very first page that Krissie, the main character, cheats on her best friend and eventually kills her. Their friendship started to go wrong when Sarah wanted a child badly, and Krissie got pregnant by accident. As you may have guessed by now, the friends are very different: Sarah is the cautious little housewife, Krissie experiments with this and that, and is hardly ready to settle down with a baby.

And after this introduction, the question why Krissie killed her friend is answered over three hundred pages told by a handful of different characters who are clearly on collision course. This grizzly murder should not be funny, nevertheless it is.

A fast read, but refreshing and quite entertaining. Should I call it light noir, or noir light?