What do you do with a thriller that hands you the killers before the first chapter even begins? That is the gamble at the heart of Getting Away With Murder by Shari Lapena, her tenth stand-alone novel, and it mostly pays off. The prologue puts you on a pitching sailboat twelve miles off Manhattan, watching Jill and Ted Westcott do something unforgivable to a man who trusts them. There is no whodunit here. The only question Lapena cares about, and the one she keeps twisting for nearly four hundred pages, is the one in her title: can they actually get away with it?
The Setup: A Marriage, A Brownstone, A Body of Water
Ted and Jill Westcott look like the couple everyone envies. He works at a Manhattan investment firm, she runs a Lower East Side art gallery, and together they worship their restored Brooklyn Heights brownstone the way other people worship their children. The house is the third character in this marriage, and honestly, it might be the one they love most.
Then the money runs out. Ted has quietly burned through his inheritance, borrowed from a loan shark, and gambled the rest on a stock tip that cratered. His older brother Greg, worth roughly forty five million dollars, refuses to lend a dime. Greg is also, conveniently, unmarried, childless, and fond of sailing without a life jacket. You can see where this is going, because Lapena shows you exactly where it is going, and that is the point.
What follows is not a mystery about a murder. It is a slow, gleeful autopsy of the aftermath, where anonymous texts, hidden cameras, and a rotating cast of suspicious friends and strangers close in on a couple who thought they had planned for everything.
What Works Brilliantly
The Inverted Thriller Structure
Why showing the crime first is the smartest choice in “Getting Away With Murder”
Lapena has always been good at domestic paranoia, but flipping the format sharpens her strengths. Because we know the truth from the opening pages, every polite conversation becomes a small horror show. When Jill serves coffee to a Coast Guard investigator in her magazine-perfect front room, we are not wondering what happened. We are counting her lies in real time, and that is a far more uncomfortable seat to sit in.
A few things this structure does exceptionally well:
- It weaponizes dramatic irony. Watching Jill perform grief for her best friend Lara, biscuits arranged just so, is more chilling than any body reveal.
- It spreads guilt around. Almost every character who orbits the Westcotts eventually reveals an appetite of their own. Nobody in this book is clean, and the moral rot is the real subject.
- It keeps the pressure mechanical and relentless. One anonymous text becomes two, two becomes a discovery inside the house itself, and each escalation forces a worse decision than the last.
- It earns its title. The final stretch turns on a question of law and reputation rather than handcuffs, and it lands somewhere colder and more cynical than a standard arrest scene ever could.
A note on spoilers
I am deliberately vague about the second half. The pleasure of this novel lives in not knowing who is watching the Westcotts, and I will not take that from you.
The Marriage Under Pressure
The strongest material in Getting Away With Murder by Shari Lapena is not the crime at all. It is the slow curdling of a marriage that once looked bulletproof. Jill fell in love with Ted partly for his money, a fact she has never quite admitted to him, and Ted committed his crime largely because he could not bear to look small in her eyes. Watching those two vanities collide under pressure is genuinely absorbing. There is a Lady Macbeth arc here, openly acknowledged in the text, and Lapena handles the role reversal between husband and wife with real patience. The person who seems strongest at the start is not the one standing steadiest at the end.
The Class Resentment Running Underneath
Special Agent Ramirez of the Coast Guard Investigative Service, a bus driver’s son from Queens, gives the book its conscience and its bile. His quiet fury at people who inherit everything and still want more threads through the whole novel. So does the cleaning lady Nadya, a Russian immigrant who scrubs brownstones by day and comes home to a sagging couch. Lapena is writing about money as much as murder, and the book is sharper for it.
Where the Rope Frays
An honest review has to note the weaknesses, and there are a few.
- The middle sags with repetition. Jill asks some version of “what are we going to do?” so many times that the phrase starts to lose meaning. Whole stretches of the second act cycle through the same suspect list, the same panic, the same reassurances, and a tighter edit could have trimmed thirty pages without losing anything.
- The prose is functional rather than beautiful. Lapena writes in a flat, present-tense style built for speed. It works, but readers who want sentences to savor will not find many here. This is plot-first storytelling, unapologetically.
- Some players stay thin. John Burnley, a con man from Ted’s past, is entertaining but never rises above a familiar type. A late-arriving figure in the blackmail plot is sketched so lightly that a major thread feels underweighted.
- Coincidence does some heavy lifting. People resurface at suspiciously convenient moments, and one character’s technical skills arrive exactly when the plot requires them.
- Ramirez borders on caricature. His obsession is believable; his habit of announcing his suspicions to everyone in the Westcotts’ circle strains procedure past the breaking point, even if it is fun to watch.
None of these problems sink the book. They do keep it a notch below Lapena’s very best work.
Lapena’s Track Record
This is the author of The Couple Next Door, the 2016 debut that sold over four million copies, and she has been reliably productive since: A Stranger in the House, An Unwanted Guest, Someone We Know, The End of Her, Not a Happy Family, Everyone Here Is Lying, What Have You Done?, and She Didn’t See It Coming. Readers of Not a Happy Family will recognize her fascination with inheritance as a moral acid test. A former lawyer, she also puts her legal background to visible use here, and the courtroom-adjacent logic of the final act is one of the novel’s cleverest touches.
If You Enjoyed This, Read These Next
Six books that scratch the same itch:
- The Talented Mr. Ripley by Patricia Highsmith, the grandparent of every “root for the killer” story
- Our House by Louise Candlish, for property obsession turned lethal
- The Couple Next Door by Shari Lapena, still her most famous domestic pressure cooker
- The Dinner by Herman Koch, wealthy people justifying the unjustifiable over four courses
- Behind Closed Doors by B. A. Paris, a perfect marriage hiding something monstrous
- The Family Upstairs by Lisa Jewell, an inheritance with a dark history attached (Jewell even gets a sly cameo on a character’s nightstand here)
Final Verdict
Getting Away With Murder by Shari Lapena is a playful, nasty, propulsive entertainment about two people who mistake ruthlessness for strength, and the swarm of watchers who prove them wrong. It asks whether crime pays and gives an answer far more uncomfortable than yes or no. The middle could be leaner and the prose stays plain, but the pages practically turn themselves, and the ending has a sting that lingers well after the cover closes. Readers picking up Getting Away With Murder by Shari Lapena for a weekend binge will get exactly what they came for, plus a surprisingly bitter chaser about money, marriage, and how much the rich can