Opening
Chapters 6–10 braid prison present with past sins as Grace Bernard sharpens her resolve, perfects another murder, and watches her one true attachment slip away. The section hits a peak of cold-blooded planning with the Lee Artemis kill, then collapses into the bitter irony of a death Grace doesn’t cause—and the conviction that follows.
What Happens
Chapter 6: The Spoon
In prison, Grace endures mandatory “enrichment” and turns a spoon-carving class into a private confession. She pockets a whittling knife, finishes her spoon in minutes, and etches into the wood the initials of every person she has killed. She hands the spoon to her unsuspecting cellmate, Kelly McIntosh, who lands in prison for blackmailing married men—offenders Grace refuses to pity.
The narrative flashes back. After her mother’s friend Helene returns to Paris, fourteen-year-old Grace moves in with her best friend, Jimmy Latimer, and his comfortable, liberal family. She soaks up the Latimers’ warmth while clocking the hypocrisies of wealth, sharpening her sense of Class Warfare and Social Inequality and recommitting to Revenge and Vengeance against her biological father’s clan.
Grace and Jimmy become inseparable. On a trip to Greece, irritated by the entitlement of a friend’s girlfriend, Grace doses her with ipecac, ruining the girl’s holiday. Back in London, Grace aces her exams but refuses university; she has a timetable and will not dilute it with campus life.
Chapter 7: The Viper in the Bosom
From prison, Grace mocks an upcoming “how to be a boss” lecture, then resumes her past. She takes a stockroom job at Sassy Girl, a fast-fashion brand owned by her father, Simon Artemis, and moves into a Hornsey flat. On the first night, she and Jimmy sleep together—Grace sees it as tightening a bond she intends to control. She climbs to a junior marketing role at Artemis Holdings’ HQ, now working in the same building as Simon.
At the lavish staff party at the Artemis mansion—the house she once visited as a child with her mother—Grace feels like “a proverbial viper” sinking into the family’s heart, pressing the theme of Family, Betrayal, and Belonging. She studies Simon’s wife, Janine; slips into a study; and cracks the glass over a family photo, scratching Simon’s face. She also befriends Tina, a chatty PA whose gossip proves valuable. Realizing proximity is dangerous to her long game, Grace quits for a better-paying role elsewhere, living small and saving steadily—quiet groundwork before the “thrilling hurtle” of her killings.
Chapter 8: The Pleasure Parade
Grace selects her next target: Simon’s younger brother Lee, a lecherous, reckless hanger-on. She tracks his lurid green Bentley through exclusive clubs, learning his habits and weaknesses. When she tails him to a Chinatown sex party called “The Pleasure Parade,” she talks her way in. At the bar, Lee drunkenly divulges a fetish for erotic asphyxiation—this becomes her angle.
Grace researches BDSM spaces, takes a first-aid course to understand strangulation, and practices a scaffold knot. After arranging a date with Lee, she steers him to a Mile End sex club. She lets him enjoy a whipping scene with another woman, then leads him to a pre-scouted private room. She convinces him to play a choking game, slips a noose around his neck, and, once the knot is secure, kicks away the stool. Lee dies by hanging. She wipes prints, stages an autoerotic-accident tableau, and leaves. The press calls it a “sex game gone wrong,” while the family spins it as a tragic one-off. At the funeral, Lee’s widow, Lara, detonates an unsparing eulogy indicting his cruelty. Impressed, Grace removes Lara from her list.
Chapter 9: De Profundis
In the present, Grace dismantles sentimental prison myths by invoking Wilde’s De Profundis, then catalogues the drab food, feral etiquette, and grinding monotony. She maintains a ferocious exercise regimen, sculpting her body into a tool for endurance—hard, protective, purposeful. She observes Nico, an inmate who killed her mother’s abuser in a flash of rage. Grace respects the motive but scorns the lack of planning, contrasting it with her own method.
Her solicitor, George Thorpe, brings more slow news on her appeal. Grace boils with a specific fury: after meticulously executing six murders, she sits inside for the one death she didn’t cause. The injustice stings not as ethics but as botched craft.
Chapter 10: The Fall of Caro
Back in the past at age twenty-six, Jimmy introduces a new girlfriend, Caro Morton—gorgeous, rich, razor-sharp, a barrister with social ease and ambition. Grace hates her on sight. The relationship accelerates; they move in together, and Caro deftly occupies every corner of Jimmy’s life, pushing Grace out.
Grace clocks Caro’s drug use, disordered eating, and volatility. When Jimmy proposes, Grace warns him on the Southbank that he is making a disastrous choice. Jimmy fires back: Grace is possessive, emotionally withholding, and unable to let him seek real commitment. Their bond fractures. At the engagement party, tension curdles as Caro drinks and uses more. On a fourth-floor balcony, Caro sneers at Grace as a “weird sister wife” and a “good deed” the Latimers have tired of. High and reckless, Caro perches on the balustrade, slips, and falls to her death. Grace closes the chapter—“I told you I won. That is, of course, until I didn’t.”—revealing that this accident is the death for which she is convicted.
Character Development
Grace’s mask hardens even as her one vulnerability—Jimmy—exposes the limits of her control. The section cements her as a strategist who prizes precision, patience, and poetic justice, yet it also shows a flicker of selective mercy when she spares Lara.
- Grace Bernard: Moves from apprentice to consummate planner, weaponizing research, patience, and setting; preserves a narrow, self-authored moral code by sparing Lara; in prison, channels discipline into bodily control and narrative control.
- Jimmy Latimer: Kind and conflict-averse, he chooses conventional stability over Grace’s opacity; his Southbank confrontation shows he understands her distance and refuses it.
- Lee Artemis: A cautionary emblem of decadent privilege; his kink becomes the exact mechanism of his end, making him both easy prey and a thematic object lesson.
- Caro Morton: A brilliant, destructive mirror for Grace—equally intelligent and socially adept but volatile; her rise triggers Grace’s deepest insecurity, and her accidental fall becomes the system’s pretext to cage Grace.
Themes & Symbols
This stretch sharpens the novel’s satire of class. Grace studies the Latimers’ curated benevolence and the Artemis clan’s performative polish, mapping the spectrum of power and entitlement. Her kills double as case studies in the uses of privilege; she infiltrates elite spaces, learns their languages, and turns their appetites against them. These chapters also chart how belonging curdles into betrayal: a foster-family warmth that never fully includes her, a biological family she penetrates only to harm, and a friendship with Jimmy that collapses under competing loyalties.
Revenge functions as craft rather than impulse. Grace’s method—research, rehearsal, right setting—operates like a brutal art form, each death tailored to a target’s vice. The balcony becomes a symbol of the precipice where mastery ends: one careless, coked-up sway and chance asserts itself, detonating Grace’s illusion of total control.
Key Quotes
“A proverbial viper, slithering into the bosom of the family.”
- Grace names her role inside the Artemis estate, framing infiltration as intimacy’s evil twin. The image fuses family and predation, encapsulating her mission to belong only long enough to betray.
“Sex game gone wrong.”
- The press’s phrase sanitizes Lee’s death with tabloid shorthand. It shows how wealth repackages scandal as mishap and how Grace exploits that reflex to hide in plain sight.
“Weird sister wife” … “good deed.”
- Caro’s insults slice to Grace’s core identity—dependent charity case, emotional interloper. The taunts expose the class narrative Caro wields against Grace and spark the confrontation’s fatal escalation.
“I told you I won. That is, of course, until I didn’t.”
- Grace punctures her own triumph with an aftershock of irony. The line reframes the section: mastery exists, but fate and the justice system can still rewrite the ending.
Why This Matters and Section Significance
These chapters mark the apex of Grace’s designed violence—the Lee Artemis murder—as well as the hinge that undoes her: Caro’s fall. Together they crystallize the book’s central irony: a meticulous killer is caught for the one death she neither plans nor executes. The prison interludes translate that irony into lived consequence, grounding the satire in a body that trains, endures, and waits. The result sets the stage for the endgame: Grace has perfected her craft, but chance, love, and class machinery tilt the board against her.