Whacked in the face with a suitcase full of karma

 

Grace Bernard has had a fairly rough life, even before she ended up in prison.  Her young French mother, who came to London to be a model, gets pregnant during a whirlwind affair.  It turns out the man is already married and wants nothing to do with Grace or her mother.  Very proud, Grace's mother is forced to work very hard to support her daughter and dies young.  Grace is taken in by a friend of her mother's (and eventually by her best friend Jimmy's family) but she grows up seething with anger that her father has rejected her.  Although the family that takes her in is very nice to her, she always feels like a guest in the home.  

Grace has always known her father is the extremely wealthy Simon Artemis, owner of the Sassy Girl fashion empire.  Grace decides to learn all she can about her father by getting a job in the business.  She eventually works her way up in the company in an effort to figure out how to get close to her father and his family.  Her plan is to kill the Artemis family one by one, leaving her father until last so she can let him know who she is and that she is responsible for the deaths.  Oh, and once they are all dead she can claim the Artemis fortune as the only surviving member of the family.

The book begins with Grace deciding to write her memoirs from prison.  She is currently incarcerated for murder, but not for anyone she actually killed.  She readily admits that she *has* killed quite a few people, just not the one she's in jail for.  She's hired a high-powered attorney to appeal her conviction, so in the meantime, to stave off boredom and avoid interacting with her perky, annoying cellmate Kelly, she decides to secretly write down how she put her plan into action.

Grace is an interesting character, full of snark and totally focused on her family annihilation plan.  That being said, from the start I was puzzled as to why she would put evidence of her crimes in writing IN A PRISON CELL that could be searched by her cellmate or guards at any time.  I did enjoy the story, if I could suspend that disbelief in a totally out-of-character premise.  There is a twist at the end with someone who shows up out of the blue, but overall, the story was quite enjoyable and I did, oddly, root for Grace to get her revenge on the (mostly) totally immoral and selfish Artemis clan.