Grace Bernard

Quick Facts

• Role: Protagonist and first-person narrator; writer of the novel’s prison memoir
• First appearance: Chapter 1 (opens the book from her cell, already convicted for a murder she didn’t commit)
• Key relationships: Marie Bernard (mother), Simon Artemis (father), Jimmy Latimer (best friend), Harry Hawthorne (half-brother)

Who They Are

At once mordant, methodical, and hypnotically persuasive, Grace is a darkly compelling anti-heroine whose life narrows to a single, ruthless purpose: avenge her mother by eliminating the six members of her estranged father’s family. She weaponizes charm, patience, and intelligence to expose the rot of a wealthy clan and the social systems that protect them. As a figure, she doubles as a scalpel for class anger—her cool, unemotional violence functions as a satire of privilege and a critique of what neglect and inequity can breed.

Personality & Traits

Grace’s voice is razor-sharp and unsentimental; her precision is both her superpower and her prison. She doesn’t seek redemption—she seeks results. The tension of the book lies in how often her cutting logic feels, disturbingly, like justice, especially when viewed through the lenses of Revenge and Vengeance and Class Warfare and Social Inequality.

• Intelligent and meticulous: She spends years building a “complex and careful plan,” tailoring each murder to the victim’s habits and environment; the Marbella cliff “accident” with Jeremy and Kathleen Artemis exemplifies her logistical foresight and willingness to wait for perfect conditions.
• Cynical, misanthropic wit: Her narration skewers “the masses” and the vacuity of upper-class life; even in prison, her contempt extends to fellow inmates like Kelly McIntosh, reinforcing her alienation from almost everyone.
• Vengeful yet principled (on her terms): She frames her killings as moral arithmetic on behalf of Marie Bernard, insisting they are a necessary rebalancing rather than crimes.
• Class-conscious opportunist: Raised in poverty while knowing her father is a billionaire, she both despises unearned privilege and acquires a taste for luxury, folding that desire into her strategic endgame.
• Emotionally detached: She describes “disassociation” as a survival switch that lets her perform “pretty unpleasant things” with chilling calm, redefining self-control as a tool for violence.
• Manipulative operator: She nimbly choreographs people—charming Amir on a plane to secure a car, recruiting a teenage hacker to eliminate her step-grandmother, and maintaining a controlling intimacy with Jimmy Latimer to keep him useful.
• Aesthetic self-awareness: She leverages her “somewhat beautiful face” strategically, preferring plainness when invisibility is more advantageous; noticing her red, pointed nails echoing Kathleen Artemis’s becomes a quiet, unsettling emblem of the family tie she’s erasing.

Character Journey

Grace’s arc is a steady tightening of focus rather than a moral evolution. At thirteen, after discovering letters that expose Simon Artemis’s cruelty, she vows retribution and devotes her adolescence to apprenticeship in patience: researching, learning, rehearsing how to disappear in plain sight. Adulthood brings execution—the family members die in curated scenarios that flatter her ingenuity and confirm her belief that control is the highest good. The novel’s grim irony is that she’s convicted for a death she didn’t cause, and yet even prison can’t cancel her victory—until Harry Hawthorne’s letter detonates her narrative. By revealing he killed Simon and holds evidence of her other crimes, Harry strips her of triumph, money, and meaning. The woman who believed she could script reality discovers she is only a character in another strategist’s plot.

Key Relationships

Marie Bernard: Grace’s grief-stricken love for her mother is the engine of her life. Every murder is staged as retroactive justice for Marie’s abandonment and suffering—Grace’s way of making the world pay attention to a pain it ignored.

Simon Artemis: The father who rejects her and Marie becomes the axis of her hatred. He embodies the entitlement and impunity she wants to punish; his death is supposed to be the closing argument of her case against him—and the moment she proves that power can be made answerable.

Jimmy Latimer: As her oldest friend, Jimmy offers a fragile line to normalcy. Grace’s affection is real but instrumental, and his testimony against her at trial becomes a double betrayal: of their bond and of her illusion that she can control every variable.

Harry Hawthorne: The secret half-brother is a mirror—and a threat. He shares her calculation but outplays her, turning her story into a cautionary tale about hubris and the limits of solitary genius.

Defining Moments

Grace’s life is a sequence of meticulously staged inflection points; each deepens her commitment to revenge while narrowing the possibility of any other identity.

• Discovering her father’s cruelty (Chapter 4): At thirteen, she reads letters that confirm Simon’s rejection of her dying mother. Why it matters: This is the origin of her ethic—the moment grievance becomes vocation and patience becomes weapon.
• The first murders (Chapter 1): She runs Jeremy and Kathleen Artemis’s car off a cliff in Marbella, pausing to whisper to Jeremy, “I’m going to kill your whole family.” Why it matters: It announces her method—premeditated spectacle fused with intimate, personal punctuation.
• The balcony fall (Chapter 10): During an argument, Caro Morton falls to her death; Grace is wrongly convicted. Why it matters: Fate mimics her design, exposing the brutal irony that she’s punished only when she’s innocent.
• The final revelation (Chapter 18): In prison, Harry Hawthorne writes to reveal he killed Simon and will blackmail her with proof of her other murders. Why it matters: It empties her life’s project of meaning and flips the power dynamic—Grace becomes the controlled, not the controller.

Essential Quotes

“I have killed several people (some brutally, others calmly) and yet I currently languish in jail for a murder I did not commit.”

• Analysis: Grace’s thesis statement blends confession with bitter irony. It primes the reader to question guilt, justice, and the difference between legal punishment and moral consequence.

“After all, almost nobody else in the world can possibly understand how someone, by the tender age of 28, can have calmly killed six members of her family. And then happily carried on with the rest of her life, never to regret a thing.”

• Analysis: The calmness is the point—she defines herself not by rage but by control. The lack of regret reads as both armor and indictment, inviting the reader to marvel at her poise while recoiling from it.

“And even then, I remember understanding so clearly, that something very wrong had been done to Marie and me.”

• Analysis: This is the seed of her moral logic: harm demands redress. The clarity she claims as a child legitimizes, in her mind, the lifelong plan that follows.

“I felt something switch off in my brain at that moment, as though I were suddenly on standby, not able to function at full capacity. I later learnt that this is called disassociation… It’s a horrendous feeling but it has served me well in times when, well, I’ve had to do some pretty unpleasant things.”

• Analysis: She reframes trauma’s symptom as a tactical asset. Detachment becomes her technology for enacting violence without psychological collapse.

“The best lies have a kernel of truth, making it easier to stick to your story and less likely to get caught up in different versions.”

• Analysis: Her ethos of deception borrows credibility from reality. By anchoring fictions in verifiable details, she turns honesty into a tool for manipulation—a fitting credo for a narrator who controls not just events, but the telling of them.