Most thrillers spend their pages asking “whodunit.” Shari Lapena’s newest asks a colder question: how far will an ordinary, desperate couple go to keep the life they’ve built, and how long can they keep getting away with it? “Getting Away with Murder” drops the guessing game before the story even starts, and the result is one of the tensest, most propulsive books Lapena has written yet.
Ted and Jill Westcott look, from the outside, like a golden couple — a beautiful home, a comfortable marriage, a life that photographs well. Underneath it, they are drowning: crushing debt, a loan shark who wants his money now, and a bank account that can’t cover either. The fix arrives in the form of Ted’s brother Greg, who is sitting on a $45 million fortune and about to join them for a sail out into the Atlantic. Only two of the three are meant to come home. Lapena tells readers exactly what the Westcotts have done in the opening pages, then spends the rest of the novel tightening the net around them as Paul Ramirez, a U.S. Coast Guard investigator with an instinct for inconsistencies, starts asking questions the Westcotts can’t quite answer cleanly.
What makes the book work is that inversion. Stripped of the “who,” the suspense becomes entirely about exposure — every witness statement, every inconsistency in Ted and Jill’s story, every small decision made in panic becomes a potential unraveling thread. Lapena has always been good at short, propulsive chapters that make a book disappear in a weekend, and here that instinct serves the premise perfectly: readers aren’t turning pages to learn who’s guilty, they’re turning pages because they’re not sure the guilty will be caught, and they’re not entirely sure they want them to be. The Westcotts are not criminal masterminds. They’re two people who made one catastrophic decision and are now improvising their way through the consequences, which makes them oddly sympathetic even as the walls close in. Ramirez, meanwhile, gives the book its procedural backbone — patient, unglamorous investigative work that never tips into caricature.
Critical reaction to the book has been largely enthusiastic. Reviewers have pointed to it as a sharp entry in the current wave of thrillers fixated on wealth, inheritance, and the lengths people will go to hold onto both, while noting that Lapena’s choice to make her killers financially desperate rather than cartoonishly greedy gives the book more emotional traction than a typical eat-the-rich thriller. The pacing has drawn particular praise — critics have called out the book’s momentum and its steady stream of small, credible complications as evidence that Lapena remains one of the most reliable hitmakers in the genre, even as some have noted the premise sacrifices a bit of mystery for its “will they get caught” structure.
That trade-off is, ultimately, the point, and it pays off. “Getting Away with Murder” is a lean, nervy thriller that trusts its readers to find plenty of suspense in inevitability rather than surprise. It’s an ideal weekend read for anyone who likes their crime fiction fast, and it’s a strong reminder of why Lapena’s name on a cover has become its own kind of promise.
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