Opening
In these chapters, Grace Bernard sits in Limehouse prison, seething at a wrongful conviction even as she coolly recounts the murders she did commit. Flashbacks map her precision, pettiness, and pride, while the present strips away her control, forcing her to wrestle with chance, betrayal, and a revenge plan that refuses to end the way she wants. The result is a sharp, darkly funny portrait of a killer trapped by the one crime she didn’t commit—and the one kill she never gets to make.
What Happens
Chapter 11: What the Fuck Have You Done?
Grace meets her lawyer, George Thorpe, to strategize her appeal. She endures the company of her obtuse cellmate, Kelly McIntosh, whom she despises as a “vengeful angel” haunting her. When Kelly casually brags about shoplifting from “Sassy Girl,” the chain owned by Grace’s father, Simon Artemis, Grace masks her panic—she has hidden her Artemis connection from everyone inside.
The chapter pivots to the night of Caro Morton’s death. On a balcony during an engagement party, Grace watches Caro—drunk, quiet, tottering—tip over the edge and vanish. For once, Grace panics; when her best friend and Caro’s fiancé, Jimmy Latimer, finds her in shock, he grabs her and hisses, “What the fuck have you DONE?” That single assumption, rooted in his knowledge of Grace’s hatred for Caro, becomes the case’s spine.
At the station, Detective Gemma Adebayo interviews Grace, who crafts a bland, plausible account of a friendly chat that ends in a tragic accident. It doesn’t matter. Jimmy refuses to see her, and his testimony—echoed by a party guest named Angelica—casts Grace as a jealous rival who pushed Caro. The verdict is sealed: Grace goes down for the one death she did not cause.
Chapter 12: The Internet of Things
A glossy magazine profile of Janine Artemis’s Monaco “smart home” sparks Grace’s plan. Posing as a journalist, she interviews a security academic who explains the key vulnerability: if an unencrypted device joins the network, it can compromise the entire system—a perfect mechanism for Revenge and Vengeance.
Grace recruits a teenage hacker from Iowa, Pete (handle: ColdStoner17), by catfishing him as “Eve,” a flirty 16-year-old eager to prank her “evil stepmother.” In Monaco, Grace scopes the building and targets Lacey Phan, Janine’s resentful housekeeper. A bribe gets a Wi‑Fi power strip planted inside the apartment, granting total remote access—lights, locks, cameras, speakers.
On Lacey’s day off, the trap springs. Watching Janine via CCTV, Grace and Pete lure her toward the bathroom by toggling lights, then lock her inside the sauna and ratchet up the heat. In a rare moment of direct contact, Grace speaks through the speakers, telling Janine who she is—the abandoned daughter of Simon Artemis—and why she’s come. As Janine weakens, she tries to write Grace’s name on the steamed glass. Panicked, Grace orders the temperature up again. Janine dies from heatstroke compounded by a bad heart. Afterward, Grace corrals Pete’s silence with a cocktail of flattery, threats, and blackmail.
Chapter 13: Daddy’s Diamanté
Grace first encounters her half-sister Bryony at a nail salon, clocking her as an entitled influencer cliché: rude to workers, glued to her phone, and loud on Instagram—an emblem of Class Warfare and Social Inequality. From Bryony’s posts, Grace learns the crucial detail: a severe peach allergy.
Plan A: a luxury beauty gift box with a face mask secretly laced with peach seed extract. When Bryony doesn’t immediately react, Grace pivots. Plan B: a wellness retreat in Ibiza run by guru Russell Chan, culminating in a decadent party. Grace gets hired through Bespoke Bangers catering, intending to deliver a peach-laced cocktail straight into Bryony’s hand.
Before she can fly, the Evening Standard breaks the news: Bryony is found dead at 27 in her bedroom. The cause isn’t clear; the papers suggest possible suicide after Janine’s death. Grace is floored—again, meticulous plotting undone by chance.
Chapter 14: Full of Grace
Back in prison, Grace keeps her kill list taped to the back of a photo of her mother, Marie Bernard, and replays her trial. The prosecution rests almost entirely on Jimmy and Angelica, who paint her as a jealous murderer. Sentenced to sixteen years, she sinks into a flat, airless depression.
Thorpe jolts the case awake. He discovers the neighbors’ balcony CCTV—owned by a Russian couple abroad—that the police never pursued. An associate tracks the couple to Moscow, obtains the footage, and the tape shows Grace nowhere near Caro when she falls. It’s the silver-bullet exoneration that will overturn the conviction.
With release imminent, Jimmy writes a contrite, clunky letter and then calls. Old intimacy resurfaces: he is guilt-ridden; she performs magnanimity. Grace sketches a new future—press statement, legal claim on the Artemis fortune, a life bankrolled by the family she has systematically ruined.
Chapter 15: The Icing on the Cake
On her last prison night, Grace dreams of her mother and admits the worst blow: she never gets to kill Simon. After Bryony’s death, she attends the funeral in disguise and sees a diminished, grieving man. Soon, diary items report Simon’s paranoia—he believes a hidden enemy is dismantling his lineage.
Grace delays her final strike, distracted by Jimmy and Caro’s fallout. Then the headline lands: Simon vanishes off St. Tropez after taking a speedboat out drunk; his body is never found. Grace is devastated—not by his death, but by the theft of her moment. The ultimate kill is lost to chaos.
Her deepest prison despair comes from that theft and from being caged for a murder she didn’t commit. What snaps her back is reading that Lara, Andrew’s widow, plans a charitable foundation with Artemis money. Fear of losing the fortune refocuses her. She reframes Simon’s “accident” as the product of her terror campaign: if she drove him to that edge, she still played a vital, if indirect, role.
Character Development
Grace’s voice toggles between icy control and raw need, exposing a killer who can plot flawlessly yet craves the performance of vengeance as much as its outcomes.
- Grace Bernard: Ruthless strategist who manipulates a teen hacker and a mistreated housekeeper; a shock-stricken onlooker at Caro’s fall; a depressive inmate who reanimates when money and legacy are threatened; a consummate reframer who claims indirect ownership of Simon’s death.
- Jimmy Latimer: Loving confidant turned instant accuser; his snap judgment and later remorse reveal a weak center—easy certainty in crisis, belated loyalty in safety.
- Simon Artemis: Moves from distant titan to a haunted, paranoid father; reduced by grief long before his disappearance; his accidental end becomes the novel’s anticlimax.
- Janine Artemis: Cruel, status-obsessed, and careless with workers; her smart home becomes her tomb.
- Bryony Artemis: Influencer archetype whose public shallowness and private fragility collide; dies offstage, collapsing Grace’s elaborate plans.
- Kelly McIntosh: Comic-irritant foil whose obliviousness needles Grace and threatens to expose her roots.
- Pete (ColdStoner17): Lonely, eager to please, and easily weaponized; later held in line by Grace’s manipulations.
Themes & Symbols
Grace’s revenge looks surgical, but these chapters redefine victory. Her triumphs depend as much on timing, technology, and other people’s small cruelties as on her genius, while her two most wanted targets slip away to accident and bureaucracy. The novel insists that control is a story we tell ourselves; chance and perception do the real work.
The techno-theater of Janine’s murder and the social-media theater of Bryony’s life underscore how wealth’s tools become vulnerabilities. Smart systems and curated personas promise security and status; Grace turns them into doors, locks, and maps.
- Revenge and Vengeance: Her most baroque kill hinges on network fragility, not just will; when Bryony and Simon die without her hand, she learns the difference between outcome and authorship.
- Class War: Grace exploits class rifts—Janine’s cruelty primes Lacey to help; Bryony’s influencer economy looks glossy but is hollow and exposed.
- Family, Betrayal, and Belonging: Grace’s ferocity springs from exclusion by the Artemis clan; Jimmy’s betrayal mimics that abandonment, making his remorse both balm and poison.
Symbols
- Technology (smart homes, CCTV, social media): Tools of power repurposed as traps; the same surveillance that abets murder later frees Grace.
- The List: Names hidden behind Marie’s photo turn revenge into ritual; Simon’s uncrossed name marks a wound she tries to cauterize with narrative spin.
Key Quotes
“What the fuck have you DONE?” Jimmy’s reflexive accusation becomes the prosecution’s cornerstone. It exposes how reputation can eclipse fact: because Grace is the kind of person who could kill, everyone decides she did. The line also fractures their intimacy, recasting him from ally to architect of her downfall.
“Vengeful angel” Grace’s sneer at Kelly turns a banal cellmate into a moral tormentor. The phrase reveals Grace’s class contempt and self-mythologizing—she imagines punishment tailored for her, even inside the random grind of prison life.
“I did play a vital role.” Grace’s later self-justification reframes Simon’s accidental death as her victory. The insistence shows her need to control the narrative when events refuse to be controlled, and highlights her unreliability as she edits failure into triumph.
Why This Matters and Section Significance
These chapters fuse the novel’s engines: a meticulous how-to of murder and a mordant joke about control. Grace executes the kill that proves her brilliance (Janine) and loses the kills that would complete her story (Bryony, Simon). She’s caged for a crime she didn’t commit and freed by the same surveillance culture she exploits, underscoring the book’s central irony.
The section resets the stakes for the finale. With exoneration imminent, Grace plans to monetize her victimhood and cash in on the Artemis estate. The revenge plot is “complete” only because she says it is—raising the question the ending must answer: if you can rewrite the story, do you ever have to stop?