I have several folk to thank for sending me a surprise copy of An Ethical Guide to Murder by Jenny Morris, including The Likely Suspects, Laurie McShea and Harriett Collins. My grateful thanks to them all. I’m delighted to share my review of An Ethical Guide to Murder today.
An Ethical Guide to Murder is published by Simon and Schuster on 16th January 2025 and is available for pre-order through the publisher links here.
An Ethical Guide to Murder
How to Kill Your Family meets The Power in this entertaining and thought-provoking read, that asks:
If you had the power between life and death, what would you do?
Thea has a secret.
She can tell how long someone has left to live just by touching them.
Not only that, but she can transfer life from one person to another – something she finds out the hard way when her best friend Ruth suffers a fatal head injury on a night out.
Desperate to save her, Thea touches the arm of the man responsible when he comes to check if Ruth is all right. As Ruth comes to, the man quietly slumps to the ground, dead.
Thea realises that she has a godlike power: but despite deciding to use her ability for good, she can’t help but sometimes use it for her own benefit.
Boss annoying her at work? She can take some life from them and give it as a tip to her masseuse for a great job.
Creating an ‘Ethical Guide to Murder’ helps Thea to focus her new-found skills.
But as she embarks on her mission to punish the wicked and give the deserving more time, she finds that it isn’t as simple as she first thought.
How can she really know who deserves to die, and can she figure out her own rules before Ruth’s borrowed time runs out?
My Review of An Ethical Guide to Murder
Thea finds herself with the power of life and death.
Crikey! I can’t honestly say I enjoyed An Ethical Guide to Murder but my goodness I thought it was good! I found it such a powerful read that messed with my mind as I tried to decide my opinion of Thea, and to rationalise why I felt so conflicted. Jenny Morris’s writing is so impactful that the reader experiences the depth of Thea’s emotions with her, which has the effect of occasionally making them feel complicit in her often dubious actions.
Thea is a complex character. She has an advanced sense of morality which should make liking her straightforward. And yet, she’s obsessive, misguided and flawed so that whilst she feels all the more human, the fact that she is willing to lie, to obfuscate the reality of events and indeed, to murder, made me dislike her at times and feel frustrated by her at other times. She evoked profound responses in me as a reader, and for all my negative thoughts about her, I grew to love her and wept for her too.
The plot premise is both simple and clever. Thea has the ability to take time from people’s lives and bestow it on others – which she does, regularly. The trouble is, what feels right doesn’t always prove to be the case, and judging others to the extent of, in effect, murdering them, doesn’t necessarily prove to be the panacea for all the ills they have caused. As a result, the book is disturbing, gripping and unsettling. It’s one of those stories that permeates the reader’s brain even when they are not reading An Ethical Guide to Murder.
Morality is a central theme, but it is supported by other aspects like choice, truth, corruption, wealth, perception, coercion, control and trust so that I found reading An Ethical Guide to Murder a bit like standing on quick sand. No sooner had I decided my stance towards Thea than Jenny Morris pulled away my certainty and gave me another perspective to ponder. I was left reeling by this narrative.
I found An Ethical Guide to Murder completely mind blowing because the moral dilemma central to the story is so complex that I found it impossible to decide my own position. It’s a book I highly recommend so that you can make your own decisions – about Thea, about justice and about your own morality. Be warned. It might well leave you totally befuddled and you’ll definitely wonder just what you might do in Thea’s place!
About Jenny Morris
Jenny Morris lives in Crowborough, the home of Winnie the Pooh and an outrageous number of charity shops. She has a PhD in Cognitive Psychology and works as a behavioural scientist. When not reading or writing, she enjoys galloping around the Ashdown Forest on a horse, foraging for mushrooms and getting way too intense about board games at the pub.
For further information, follow Jenny on Twitter/X @Dr_Jenny_Morris, Instagram and Bluesky.
