(courtesy Affirm Press)
When you pick up the superlative gem that is The Hitwoman’s Guide to Reducing Household Debt by Mark Mupotsa-Russell, you first think that here is a quirky, whimsical read of a ex-hitwoman, now happily and cosily domiciled in suburban life in the Dandenong Ranges near Melbourne, who has her past come out of nowhere to ruin all her current familial bliss.
The plot reads as if she be led on a merry dance trying to fend killers and crooks from the past she thought she’d left behind, all while doing school runs, hosting dinner parties and holding down a super successful career as an events organiser.
Oh the laughs, oh the fun, of the hijinks and slapstick writ large on pages.
But then BOOM! Mupotsa-Russell revs things into top gear and suddenly what you get is a very serious and often heartrending rumination on grief, trauma and how, despite our best efforts, we can never really leave our past behind us, no matter how hard we try.
To be fair, Olivia Hodges has tried very hard to leave the past in a very bloody past, but when you were killer for hire for a Spanish crime syndicate, where the justification for killing someone was wafer thin and self-serving, there are a lot of bodies, and thus disembodied souls, wanting to come and figuratively haunt you.
Or if they’re not available, and ghosts are often fiendishly elusive, then the person who ordered the killings who, it turns out, is very much alive, knows where Olivia is and is about to make her present life very uncomfortable and nasty indeed.
‘Please, Liese. What do you do to make it enough?’
I sigh from deep in my belly. ‘You just make it enough. You have to, because it’s the best anyone gets.’
Olivia, however, no longer does nasty.
She loves her husband, Canadian-Sikh-Australian Jaideep and adores her young daughters Edith aka Edie and Leena, and with her business staging events doing very well indeed, thank you very much, what Olivia wants is happy and suburbanly joyful.
But as you’ve likely worked out by now, that’s not what she gets at all, and as The Hitwoman’s Guide to Reducing Household Debt really picks up gear, it becomes jarringly obvious just how bad things are going to get.
Until it doesn’t, and Mupotsa-Russell goes to places you are simply not expecting, and what you expect to be a jocular, whimsical ride into the dark side of life as it comes crashes into its sunnier, more humdrum version, becomes something altogether different.
And, my lord, what an emotional ride it is.
Battling the return of her crime boss from Barcelona days, and the actions of a small-time local criminal gang who impact her life in some fairly savagely sad ways, Olivia comes to believe that all the terrible things raining down upon her are well deserved and that she only has herself to blame.
The universe wants it pound of flesh for her many and sustained sins, she believes, and while she instinctually reacts by seeking revenge on those who have wronged her, she is grappling with a searing sense that all of her current woes are an inescapable punishment that she cannot wish away.
(courtesy official author site)
Of course, when the universe is coming to demand payment for a metric ton of karmic debt, the last thing you want to do is add to it.
So Olivia has to get super creative about the way she tracks down those who have wronged her, leading her to devise ways in which the guilty will effectively punish themselves, and she can go back, so the thinking goes, to her happy life far away from the trials and tribulations of her murderous past.
But it doesn’t quite work out that way, and The Hitwoman’s Guide to Reducing Household Debt, ends up being a searingly clever and incredibly thoughtful and emotionally insightful journey into what happens when life doesn’t play by the rules you thought had been agreed.
Brilliantly imaginative, darkly troubling and emotionally searing, The Hitwoman’s Guide to Reducing Household Debt is an absolute triumph, a story packed full of explosively intense moments that still feels like a ruminative dark night of the soul, the kind that unfurls slowly but destructively.
It’s a beguiling but shocking mix and Mupotsa-Russell executes it to immersive perfection, crafting a story that dives deep and dark into the very worst things that life can throw at you all while asking how much of the terrible things visited upon us are our fault and how many couldn’t be avoided if we tried. and god knows, Olivia has tried to make up for the hellish mess of her past.
The screen glares in my eyes. ‘No Caller ID.’ The speaker crackles with ambient noise before a familiar Spanish-accented voice speaks, echoing in the small space.
‘Hello, my darling.’
As novels go, The Hitwoman’s Guide to Reducing Household Debt is one of the very best ones of the year because it merrily, and yes, not-so-merrily defies expectations at every turn.
It knows that despite our best efforts, that life can turn on us and demand payment for terrible crimes done and thoughtful deeds executed (quite literally in Olivia’s case) and that we can either fall under the oncoming karma train or try to fight back.
But then, fighting back, is not necessarily the winning strategy we think it is, or that Hollywood makes it out to be; sure, sitting back and just letting karma steamroll over you isn’t fight-or-flight wired humans do all that well, but will standing up for yourself, like Olivia does, pay off as she hopes it will?
Maybe, maybe not, but much of the pleasure of reading The Hitwoman’s Guide to Reducing Household Debt is wondering on which side of that divide Olivia will land and how much damage will be done to herself and those she loves before everything lands in their final resting and no doubt bruised and battered resting places.
The Hitwoman’s Guide to Reducing Household Debt is such an enthralling good read – it has violence and action and crime but even more potently, deep and searing insights and portrayals of grief, loss, trauma and despair, all carried by characters so richly compelling that you cannot put the book down even if you want to (spoiler alert: you will not) leaving you carried on a wave of vengeful energy and fury that, when it washes up, deposits nowhere you were expecting to be, which is, quite simply one of the great gifts of this superb book, and any great read, really.