My sister, the serial killer

Braithwaite’s novel begins with a problem so absurdly simple it becomes almost elegant: Ayoola kills her boyfriends, and Korede, her older sister, helps clean up the mess. From that premise, the book builds a tight, uneasy comedy of damage control, in which Korede’s competence becomes both a moral burden and a kind of prison. The Lagos setting is not ornamental; it gives the story texture, pressure, and a social field in which appearance, respectability, and family reputation matter as much as evidence. The result is a thriller that is also, more importantly, an anatomy of the stories families tell themselves to survive.

What makes the book memorable is not the murders themselves, which Braithwaite treats with a brisk, almost contemptuous efficiency, but the sisterly dynamic at the center of them. Korede is all nerve endings and restraint, a woman whose care has curdled into resentment without ever losing its shape as love. Ayoola, by contrast, is written as charm in human form—infuriating, childish, radiant, and dangerously underexamined by everyone around her. Braithwaite understands that sibling relationships are often built from precisely this contradiction: tenderness sharpened by envy, loyalty poisoned by knowledge, devotion that survives its own humiliation.

Formally, the novel is at its strongest when it is most stripped down. Braithwaite’s short chapters create a clipped, accelerating rhythm; the prose often moves with the efficiency of a report, which makes the emotional implications land with a steadier force than melodrama would. She is especially good at letting a small detail do disproportionate work—a glance, a cleaning routine, a social exchange that seems harmless until you see the power it encodes. The book’s comedy is never merely decorative; it is one of its chief instruments of critique, exposing how casually people excuse what they want to excuse, especially when beauty is involved.

My reservation is that the novel’s sleekness sometimes comes at the expense of depth. Ayoola, though memorably drawn, can feel less like a fully human antagonist than a beautifully rendered force of disruption; the book knows how she affects others better than it knows how she came to be this way. Braithwaite gestures toward trauma and family history, and those currents are certainly present, but they are not always explored with the same rigor as the central dynamic between the sisters. There are moments when the satire is so cleanly executed that it risks thinning out the psychological mess beneath it, leaving the reader with an excellent premise rather than a fully accumulated tragic vision.

Even so, the novel’s final effect is more substantial than its brevity suggests. Braithwaite uses genre with admirable discipline, but she is not merely decorating a social novel with corpses; she is testing the moral logic that allows some harm to be continually smoothed over while other harm is punished. By the end, My Sister, the Serial Killer has become a story about inheritance in all its forms—beauty, violence, duty, silence—and about the humiliating fact that love does not always make us better people. It is sharp, funny, and disquieting, with enough bite to make its small size feel like a provocation.