Getting Away with Murder

Getting Away with Murder by Shari Lapena is a standalone psychological thriller published in July 2026, her tenth novel and a significant structural departure from her previous work. Where most of her catalogue - including The Couple Next Door - builds suspense around the question of who's responsible for a crime, this one inverts the formula entirely: readers know exactly who the killers are from the very first chapter.

Jill and Ted adore their New York brownstone the way others adore their children. They have carefully, expensively, made every inch of it their own - state-of-the-art kitchen, grand mahogany staircase, the stuff of glossy magazine spreads. It reflects who they are, their status and tastes. It is their sanctuary. When Ted's inheritance runs out and a bad investment leaves them facing the loss of everything they've built, the solution presents itself with an awful, logical clarity: Ted's wealthy brother Greg, who has no immediate family of his own, stands to leave Ted millions. The death of one person could save everything. Jill and Ted decide to make it happen.

What Lapena is doing here is essentially a modern Moral Dilemma thriller in the tradition of Macbeth - several reviewers have made exactly that comparison, noting that Lapena contemporizes the Lady Macbeth dynamic with sharp results. Rather than hiding the crime and building to a reveal, the novel puts readers inside the planning and the aftermath, watching two intelligent, well-presented people convince themselves that Deception on this scale is manageable, that their partnership is strong enough to hold under pressure, and that nothing will go wrong. The tension is in knowing, as readers, that something always goes wrong.

The Class Struggle embedded in the premise gives the book real social texture: Jill and Ted aren't desperate in any conventional sense - they're simply unwilling to live in a way that doesn't match their self-image. Lapena keeps that distinction clear and uncomfortable throughout, and the Obsession & Desire the couple have for their lifestyle rather than each other is one of the novel's more unsettling threads. Their marriage functions as a business arrangement as much as anything else, and watching the Morally Grey Characters at its centre rationalise escalating choices is both compulsive and deeply queasy.

The Dark Secrets that complicate their plan arrive quickly, and Lapena deploys her trademark Twist Ending energy across the back half of the novel - though here the twists function less as revelations about who did what and more as complications in whether the plan holds. Early readers have been sharply divided: some find this her most purely fun and propulsive entry yet, while others miss the traditional whodunit architecture. Kirkus gave it a starred review, calling it "scrumptiously sinister" and praising its dissection of jealousy, vengefulness, and "an unstoppable lust for money."

For fans of Lapena's fast, one-sitting Domestic Suspense pacing who fancy watching the killers sweat rather than hunting for them, Getting Away with Murder is exactly the kind of confident genre subversion that a tenth novel earns the right to attempt.