My Sister, The Serial Killer by Oyinkan Braithwaite

          This is quite a startling book in many ways, it is less about the actual act of murder but how your relationships, career and life change when you allow a murderer in to your life.  In Korede's case she does not allow a murderer in to her life, Ayoolah is thrust in to her life by nature and nurture makes her in to a harsher copy of their father.  The familial bond is strong and when Ayoolah first commits murder Korede protects her and helps destroy the evidence, perhaps this is because she believes the self defence explanation her sister gives, maybe it goes deeper than that.

I loved the juxtaposition between Korede's career as a nurse in a large hospital - a career where she is sworn to protect and help people and then her home life of second to her beautiful sister and protector of her as well as her inferior.  There is also a wonderful glimpse in to the culture of traditional Lagos - where appearances always seem set to deceive as everyone puts their bast face forward to the world.  This is perhaps best demonstrated by the memorial for their dead father, neither the sisters or their mother really want to be there but they don their matching family dress and go through with it all, for respectability's sake.

From the early chapters you could be forgiven for thinking this was going to be a police procedural with the sister's facing the full might of the law.  This is definitely not what you get, what you get is actually a touching story of family.  A very disfunctional father whose patriarch has skewed the world so far that it has irrevocably altered his daughter's mores.  Narrated by Korede we only ever really see her view of the circumstances surrounding each event but it is a full and unflinching vision.

A great first novel that is pretty compulsive reading. 

THIS IS AN HONEST AND UNBIASED REVIEW OF A FREE COPY OF THE BOOK RECEIVED VIA THE PIGEONHOLE.