How to Kill Your Husband (and other handy household hints) by Kathy Lette (top 10 novels to read TXT) 📗

About the Book

All women want to kill their husbands some of the time.

Marriage, it would appear, is a fun-packed frivolous hobby, only occasionally resulting in death. But when Jazz Jardine is arrested for her husband’s murder, the joke falls flat.

Life should begin at forty – not with life imprisonment for killing your spouse. Jazz, stay-at-home mum and domestic goddess; Hannah, childless and career-focused; and Cassie, demented working mother of two are three ordinary women.

Cassie and Hannah set out immediately to prove their best friend’s innocence, uncovering betrayal, adultery, plot twists, thinner thighs and toy boys aplenty en route. But will their friendship survive these ever darker revelations?

A novel that will strike a chord with women everywhere and ensure that, from now on, they all read the small print on their marriage licenses.

Contents

Cover

About the Book

Title Page

PART ONE

1 The Merry Widow

2 How Do I Hate Thee? Let Me Count the Ways

3 The Hand – A Modern Gothic Horror Story

4 Is There Life After Infidelity?

5 If He Wants Breakfast in Bed, Tell Him to Sleep in the Kitchen

6 The Working Mother’s Week or ‘Where the Hell’s Your Father?’

7 Ladies Who Lynch

8 To Love, Hoover and Obey

PART TWO

9 Don’t Get Mad, Get Bad

10 The Reason I Don’t Tell You When I’m Having an Orgasm Is Because You’re Never There

11 The Three Muffkateers

PART THREE

12 Genitalia Failure

13 Unhappily Ever After

14 The Sensual Interactive Surprise

15 High Infidelity

16 Wet Adulteresses of NW1

17 Till Homicide Do Us Part

18 Survival of the Prettiest

19 I’m Having My Period So Can Therefore Legally Kill You

20 When Humiliating Things Happen to Desperate Women

PART FOUR

21 Underachievers Anonymous

22 ToyBoysRUs

23 You Are Going to Enjoy This Marriage Even If I Have to Divorce You to Do So

24 The Comeuppance

PART FIVE

25 Where There’s a Will, I Wanna Be In It

26 The Househusband

27 How To Kill Your Husband – (and other handy household hints)

Acknowledgements

About the author

Also by Kathy Lette

Praise

Imprint

Read more at Penguin Books Australia

PART ONE

1. The Merry Widow

I was a forty-three-year-old mother of two when I lost my orgasm. How can you lose an orgasm, you may ask. What is it, a sock? Is it in some sexual laundry basket waiting to be paired so it can become a multiple orgasm? People often lose things. Their tempers. Their sense of humour. Their figures. (Do the words ‘control top panty hose’ mean anything to you?) Their minds. (Post babies, definitely.) But not their orgasm. I just couldn’t find it. It was more elusive than Peter Pan’s shadow. Believe me, I looked for it harder than they looked for the Bermuda Triangle, Amelia Earhart, the Yeti, the Marie Celeste, the Loch Ness Monster and the scruples of George Bush.

Perhaps you think that I, Cassie O’Carroll, am the kind of idiot who always misplaces things? It is true to say that I can’t find the square root of the hypotenuse either, but that doesn’t make me gnaw holes in my pillow and cry myself to sleep at night.

No. My poor muff’s in a huff. My pussy left high and dry: positively Miss Havishamed. And there doesn’t seem to be a goddamn thing I can do about it.

Mind you, my best friend, Jazz, has lost something much more serious – her husband, the internationally famous surgeon, humanitarian and World Health Organisation expert, Dr David Studlands. And under rather suspicious circumstances too. In fact, as I write this, Jazz is being held on suspicion of murder. Which is where this story begins really, in the visiting room of Holloway Prison for women in North London.

‘I’ve been arrested for killing my husband,’ were not words I’d ever expected to hear from the mouth of Jasmine Jardine. ‘I’m having George Clooney’s lovechild,’ perhaps, or, ‘What if PMT is a myth and I’m just a bitch?’ But definitely not this.

When I can finally talk, I feel I’m dubbing a film. ‘What?’

‘Murder . . . Those moronic cops think I’ve killed Studz. I’ve been denied bail!’

‘MURDER?’ I dub again. And there is a made-for-TV movie melodrama to it all. I’m sitting bolt upright in a straight-backed chair in a prison visiting room, staring in a state of gormless astonishment at my best friend. I must have shrieked the last word because the eyes of the prison officer dart over at me, alert but neutral, like the eyes of an over-fed predator, too lazy to pounce. The screw remains slumped in her swivel chair, flicking her newspaper, surly but apathetic.

Fright licks like flames all over me. ‘Fuck-a-duck, Jazz.’ I’m whispering now, but it still sounds piercing. ‘You . . . didn’t do anything stupid, did you?’

Jazz gives me the kind of look you’d give a sewage truck which has just backed over your groom on your wedding day. ‘You may not have noticed in all the years you’ve known me, Cassandra, but I seem to be lacking many of the key talents necessary for success as a criminal mastermind.’ There’s an edge of hysteria in her voice which attracts the prison officer once more. The chair wheezes as she shifts her bulk to pivot our way. ‘How could you even think that?’

‘Well, excuse me,’ I reply in a scalding whisper. ‘How many times have I heard you make cracks along those lines? That “marriage is a fun-packed, frivolous hobby, only occasionally resulting in death,” or “Where there’s a will, I intend being in it,” or that “Not all men are bastards – some of them are dead.” And what about the time you “accidentally” picked up the wrong malaria tablets for Studz’s Amnesty trip to Malawi? You started cooking with full cream to induce a heart attack, for God’s sake! I mean, Jeez . . .’

‘I was just letting off steam! All women want to kill their husbands some