Opening
From her cell in Limehouse prison, Grace Bernard begins a prison memoir that cuts with elegance and scorn. She calls the justice system a joke, claims she’s imprisoned for a murder she didn’t commit, and calmly confesses to having killed six members of her own family by twenty-eight.
What Happens
Grace writes amid the din of Limehouse, contempt saturating every detail—the frantic noise, the cheapness, the way tabloids inflate prison into luxury. Known inside as the “Morton murderer,” she bristles at the label and at her chatty cellmate, Kelly McIntosh, who tries to elevate her own status by posing as Grace’s confidante. Grace refuses the performance; Kelly’s hunger for second-hand notoriety is “immensely tiresome.”
Boredom and a faint glimmer of legal hope push Grace to act. She buys a flimsy notepad and biro from the canteen and starts to write, both to dodge Kelly and to seize control of her story. She draws a sharp line between petty “crimes” and her own “complex and careful plan,” insisting her deeds are not grubby lawbreaking but a high-functioning operation. She catalogs the noise around her case—tabloid myths, amateur diagnoses, a slapdash TV documentary that can’t even get her star sign right—and rejects it all.
Then she detonates the book’s central irony. The justice system, she says, proves its absurdity by caging her for a murder she didn’t commit. Yet she has executed six family murders without remorse and without detection. She admits a flicker of sadness that no one will ever appreciate the scale of her design, but secrecy is the point; she imagines this confession sealed away, discovered only after her death, when the truth about the cool, beautiful woman who killed her kin finally surfaces.
Character Development
Grace’s voice—cool, surgical, and venomously funny—defines the prologue. She positions herself above everyone around her, crafting a persona that’s both magnetic and chilling.
- Grace Bernard: Brilliant, snobbish, and utterly unrepentant, she treats murder like a precision project. She obsesses over aesthetics (the Roksanda trial dress) even as she endures Limehouse’s grime, revealing a class-conscious perfectionism and a ruthless devotion to Revenge and Vengeance.
- Kelly McIntosh: A needy foil who chases clout by proximity to infamy. Her attempts to profit socially from Grace’s presence underscore the public’s shallow true-crime appetite—the very “masses” Grace despises.
Themes & Symbols
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Class Warfare and Social Inequality: Grace’s hauteur powers the satire. She sneers at “shabby” prison life, office workers’ lukewarm lattes, and Kelly’s commonness, positioning herself as a refined outlier trapped in a vulgar world. Her fixation on taste and status exposes how class performance shapes her judgments and justifies her cruelty. First explored here, Class Warfare and Social Inequality becomes a moral compass turned upside down.
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Family, Betrayal, and Belonging: The confession reframes everything as targeted retribution within the bloodline. These are not random killings but a methodical purge, entwining grievance, identity, and a warped pursuit of belonging. The prologue plants the novel in the terrain of Family, Betrayal, and Belonging, where kinship functions as motive, map, and battlefield.
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The Memoir/Confession: Writing becomes a tool of power. Wrongfully convicted of one crime yet triumphant in six others, Grace uses the notebook to reclaim authorship, correct the record, and control how her legacy is eventually unearthed.
Key Quotes
“The general public are so enthralled by my actions that they are even willing to watch a hastily cobbled together Channel 5 documentary about me, which included a fat astronomer explaining that my star sign predicted my case. He got my star sign wrong.”
This skewers the spectacle of true crime and the laziness of media mythmaking. Grace’s contempt turns the audience itself into a target, spotlighting how entertainment value eclipses truth.
The justice system is a “joke.”
The line delivers the prologue’s core irony: she’s punished for the wrong crime. It frames the narrative as an indictment of institutional fallibility while flaunting her private victory over the law.
“Stultifying boredom.”
This phrase motivates the memoir and reveals the temperature of Grace’s inner life—restless, superior, and eager for a project worthy of her intellect. Writing cures tedium and consolidates power.
Why This Matters and Section Significance
The prologue locks in the novel’s engine: a charismatic, amoral narrator who invites the reader into complicity. The dramatic irony—innocent of the charge, guilty of worse—creates relentless tension as Grace recounts the operation the world misses. It also establishes the book’s satirical lens, taking aim at class performance and true-crime culture while unveiling an unreliable narrator whose honesty about her crimes coexists with a total absence of conscience. This opening sets the voice, the stakes, and the twisted intimacy that drive the story forward.