THE OPPOSITE OF MURDER

A perfectly normal wife and mother marches into a suburban British police station and insists on confessing to a murder that hasn’t been committed yet. Except it has.

The two reasons Jemma Stelling wants to tell DC Simon Waterhouse every detail of her plot to kill Marianne Upton, her boundlessly hateful stepmother, are that she’s already lived with this horrid dream for an agonizingly long time and she’s convinced that once he’s taken down the details, she’ll be too certain of being convicted to ever go through with it. Needless to say, Waterhouse, who wonders at length why she’s wasting his valuable time, isn’t the most patient or sympathetic interlocutor. But he gets a lot more interested once he learns that Marianne has been fatally stabbed during the very period when Jemma was confessing to him, a revelation that leads the two to switch sides instantly. The perfect alibi, Jemma tells Waterhouse. Hardly, he counters; her bogus confession only provides more evidence that she’s hired someone like her old school friend Tom Tulloch to do the job while she basks in her well-documented innocence. After all, if Jemma didn’t arrange Marianne’s death, which member of her alarmingly close-knit family did—her newly widowed father, Gareth Upton; her husband, itinerant barman Paddy Stelling; their 13-year-old daughter, Lottie; Oliver Mayo, the man Jemma left behind; or her best and perhaps only friend, Suzanne Lacy? Fans who recognize the setup as retro and claustrophobically limited won’t be surprised by Hannah’s evergreen ability to pull compelling clues out of nowhere and point them in unsuspected directions.

A model who’s-going-to-do-it from its irresistible hook to its final surprise.