My Sister, The Serial Killer

by Oyinkan Braithwaite (Atlantic Books $32.99) Reviewed by Ken Strongman

Apart from having an eyecatching although possibly off-putting title, My Sister, The Serial Killer is a fast, compelling book that grips hard because of its unusual style, setting and pace. It is the first Nigerian writing I have read, and is set in Lagos. The action takes place in the house lived in by the protagonist, Korede, her sister Ayoola and their mother, and in the hospital in which Korede is a nurse – in fact, in the end, head nurse. Korede is very tall, plain and obsessional about cleanliness. Ayoola is beautiful and truly psychopathic.

It all begins with a phone call in the night from Ayoola to Korede, essentially saying that she has accidentally knifed her latest lover to death and can Korede please come and sort it out. She does and it seems that this is the third time that she has had to do it. This is all part of the strictures laid upon Korede by her family, the older daughter having to assume a lifetime of responsibility for the welfare of her younger sister. Korede cleans up with bleach, wraps the body in sheets, and puts it in the boot of her car for the sisters to dump in the river.

And then the wonderfully self-centred, self-absorbed, truly awful but seductive Ayoola visits Korede at the hospital where she works and starts talking to a doctor that Korede has been quietly lusting after for years. The inevitable happens and he instantly falls for Ayoola. Korede’s only solace is to pour out her heart in a hospital room to a man who has long been in a coma. He is understandably non-judgmental.

What happens in the remainder of the book is not quite as predictable as one might imagine, although it does involve the knife again. It also gives a taste of what life in Lagos is like – something that, if it is accurate, is probably best avoided. One ends by feeling a great deal of sympathy for Korede and a similar sort of fascinated annoyance with Ayoola that one feels about Trump.

The style in which My Sister, The Serial Killer is written has much to do with the speed and something akin to relish with which one (this one, anyway) reads it. The chapters are all between one and three pages long, but not in the form of scenes ready made for filming. They are more like snapshots or a light being turned on facets of a complex set of relationships, with titles such as: ‘‘Dancing’’, ‘‘Knife’’, ‘‘School’’, ‘‘Icecream’’, ‘‘Man-eater’’, and so on.

This seems to be Oyinka Braithwaites’ first book but it will surely not be her last. She is a singular voice in crime fiction. She is even a little unusual in her acknowledgements in that they begin with ‘‘I am grateful first to God’’.

She doesn’t say why.