Not a Happy Family

Not a Happy Family by Shari Lapena is a standalone thriller published in July 2021, her sixth novel and an instant New York Times and Sunday Times bestseller. It's also her most overtly ensemble-driven work to date - less focused on a single domestic relationship under pressure and more interested in the slow-motion collapse of an entire family once the patriarch holding it together through fear and money is suddenly, violently gone.

The Mertons are rich. Their home in Brecken Hill, upstate New York, is the kind of house that makes very clear how much richer they are than everybody else. Fred Merton is the kind of man who uses that wealth to keep his three adult children exactly where he wants them - financially dependent, perpetually managed, reliably humiliated at family dinners. Easter Sunday is no different: Fred needles each child with the precision of long practice, Sheila says very little, and by the time everyone drives home, there is enough accumulated resentment in the room to constitute a motive several times over. The following morning, the housekeeper finds both of them murdered in their home. Fred, stabbed. Sheila, strangled. The only suspects are the three children who stood to inherit a great deal of money - and who all know considerably more about that Easter dinner than they're telling the police.

Catherine is the eldest, a dermatologist, the one their father occasionally praised - which means she has the furthest to fall and the clearest understanding of exactly what Fred's cruelty looked like from the inside. Dan is the middle child who once expected to inherit the family business, until his father sold it from under him just to watch him flounder. Jenna is the youngest, purple-haired and financially dependent on her parents in ways she resents but can't escape. All three are hiding something. All three have spouses who are hiding something too. And the Family Legacy Fred spent decades constructing - the money, the house, the debts, the dependencies - turns out to have deeper complications than even his children knew about.

Lapena tells the story across Multiple POV chapters, moving between the siblings, their partners, and the detectives working outward from the crime scene, and the tight Class Struggle dynamic between the Merton family's conspicuous wealth and everyone orbiting it gives the Murder Mystery real social texture. The Dark Secrets that surface as the investigation deepens go well beyond who killed Fred and Sheila - they touch on what Fred actually was behind the mansion doors, and what his children became as a result.

Reviewers have consistently compared this to a Knives Out dynamic, and it's not an unfair framing: a wealthy, unpleasant patriarch dead under suspicious circumstances, a house full of motivated beneficiaries, and an investigation that keeps discovering new reasons why none of them are telling the whole truth. The Deception is layered and the Mystery and Secrets Revealed maintain pace across a short, punchy read. The Twist Ending has divided readers - some find it satisfying, others predictable - but the journey to it, with its sharp sibling dynamics and acidic portrait of inherited dysfunction, is by wide consensus among Lapena's most purely enjoyable.