Shari Lapena
© TRISTAN OSTLER

Family feud

Drama and death fuel this domestic thriller

by JUDY GELMAN

Costco’s suggested Book Club read provides insight into a selected novel, as well as an appropriate recipe to accompany your own book club’s discussion.

Shari Lapena’s sixth domestic suspense thriller, Not a Happy Family, is the story of a wealthy couple who are murdered after a tense dinner with their three adult children, who stand to inherit a fortune.

Lapena has explored relationships between intimate partners in her previous novels, including The Couple Next Door and A Stranger in the House. “The potential for suspense is amped with couples,” says Lapena. “There’s something so unnerving about realizing something terrible about [a person] you think you know.”

In Not a Happy Family, Lapena turns her focus to the complicated relationships between adult siblings. “Dysfunctional families make for great material,” she explains, “and here we have a highly dysfunctional one. Fred Merton, the patriarch, is a self-made man of significant wealth, but also a closet psychopath. His wife, Sheila, is distant. Their children share a fraught past and, after their parents’ murder, an even more fraught present, as they are all suspects.”

A dinner scene kicks off the novel as the family gathers for Easter at the Merton mansion. “I love skewering conventions of all kinds, such as Easter dinner, or any celebratory family feast, which should be a time of joy and togetherness, but of course often isn’t,” says Lapena. “There’s a lot of tension in this family at the best of times, but this is a particularly uneasy occasion. While they should be enjoying the turkey, stuffing, scalloped potatoes and salads, that their housekeeper, Irena, has prepared. Fred Merton is drinking too much chardonnay, and things quickly turn dark. He drops little bombs, upsetting each of his children. As a result, no one stays for dessert, and by the end of that awful dinner, the stage is set. Someone brutally murders Fred and Sheila later that night.”

Since everyone at the Easter dinner departed before Irena’s dessert is served, Lapena suggests that book clubs enjoy a favorite cake of hers and Irena’s—lemon pound cake—and shares a recipe (below).

For further discussion, Lapena suggests book clubs use the Hare Psychopathy Checklist to assess people they know—or the novel’s characters. “The psychopath test might generate some interesting discussion,” she says, “because Fred Merton is a psychopath, and his children might be as well. Statistically, we all know a psychopath or two.”

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